Database Reference
In-Depth Information
DynamoDB's history
Amazon's e-commerce platform had a huge set of decoupled services developed and man-
aged individually, and each and every service had an API to be used and consumed by oth-
ers. Earlier, each service had direct database access, which was a major bottleneck. In terms
of scalability, Amazon's requirements were more than any third-party vendors could
provide at that time.
DynamoDB was built to address Amazon's high availability, extreme scalability, and dur-
ability needs. Earlier, Amazon used to store its production data in relational databases and
services had been provided for all required operations. However, they later realized that
most of the services access data only through its primary key and they need not use com-
plex queries to fetch the required data, plus maintaining these RDBMS systems required
high-end hardware and skilled personnel. So, to overcome all such issues, Amazon's engin-
eering team built a NoSQL database that addresses all the previously mentioned issues.
In 2007, Amazon released one research paper on Dynamo that combined the best of ideas
from the database and key-value store worlds, which was inspiration for many open source
projects at the time. Cassandra, Voldemort, and Riak were a few of them. You can find the
Even though Dynamo had great features that took care of all engineering needs, it was not
widely accepted at that time in Amazon, as it was not a fully managed service. When
Amazon released S3 and SimpleDB, engineering teams were quite excited to adopt these
compared to Dynamo, as DynamoDB was a bit expensive at that time due to SSDs. So, fi-
nally after rounds of improvement, Amazon released Dynamo as a cloud-based service, and
since then, it is one the most widely used NoSQL databases.
Before releasing to a public cloud in 2012, DynamoDB was the core storage service for
Amazon's e-commerce platform, which started the shopping cart and session management
service. Any downtime or degradation in performance had a major impact on Amazon's
business, and any financial impact was strictly not acceptable, and DynamoDB proved it-
self to be the best choice in the end. Now, let's try to understand in more detail about Dy-
namoDB.
