Question: When to use DynamoDB?

Answer

DynamoDB is a perfect choice for all sizes of applications, especially if your application needs predictable read and write performance. DynamoDB thanks to automatic scaling is able to survive the biggest traffic spikes. Moreover, the costs of DynamoDB are very predictable.

DynamoDB can be used for almost anything, including:

• Simple key-value store like metadata store
• Relational data store (Using Adjacency List Pattern \ Single Table Design)
• Geographical data, using Geohashing
• Timeseries, using multiple tables per period
• Caching (even more efficient with DAX)
• Event-driven transaction processing (thanks to DynamoDB Streams)
• Session store/history with TTL (time-to-live)
• Leaderboards
• Shopping carts using Transactions
• Workflow engines
• Relationship graph data stores (Using Adjacency List Pattern)

Moreover, when choosing the database for your next project, you should award a few extra points to DynamoDB if:

• You want to go Serverless. DynamoDB integrates with AWS Lambda and other AWS Serverless offerings really well
• You are going to deal with massive traffic with erratic spikes
• You want to be asynchronous and event-driven
• You want to minimize your costs and scale them ideally with your application usage