DAX: DynamoDB Accelerator

There are situations when the read or write speed is not as fast as an application needs it to be. For this reason, AWS provides us with the possibility of putting a component between our application and the database that allows us to improve the speed of interaction with our data. That component is a DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX). In this lesson, we are going to discuss what DAX is.

What is cache?

Before talking about what a DAX is, let’s first talk about what a cache is. When we read from a traditional database, so to speak, the information we’re reading is being stored on a hard disk which can either be solid state drives (SSD) or hard disk drives (HDD). The problem with this is that the access speed can often be slow. For this reason, there are other types of databases where the information is stored in RAM.

This type of database that stores information in RAM is called in-memory or cache database. The access speed in this type of system is much faster than disk access. ...