DynamoDB

What is DynamoDB?

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database, which delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multi-region, multi-active, durable database with built-in security, backup and restoration, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. - AWS

DynamoDB is a simple database that supports key-value and document-based table design. It is fully-managed and provides high performance at scale. Interestingly, its performance improves with scale.

History of DynamoDB

The history of DynamoDB can be traced back to the 2004 holiday season. At that time, Amazon experienced a lot of outages due to the use of third-party databases. These databases were designed for the pre-internet era. They were SQL-based and didn’t scale well to the level of Amazon.

Thus, a new solution was needed for internet-scale applications. The engineers at Amazon came up with Dynamo. No, that is not a typo. Dynamo is different from DynamoDB. Dynamo uses consistent hashing, replication, and NoSQL design to deliver a very good performance at scale. However, Dynamo was not a managed database. The teams didn’t adapt Dynamo due to the overhead of provisioning and managing servers. Later, a new DB was created that was fully managed and had all the positives of Dynamo. This new DB was called DynamoDB.