Leveraging Amazon DynamoDB to achieve cloud-based digital transformation success

Amazon DynamoDB is a document and key-value NoSQL database management system that delivers millisecond performance at any instance. It is a fully managed, durable, multi-master, and multiregional database that provides in-memory caching to allow internet applications to scale, backup & restore, and achieve improved security. Amazon DynamoDB stands out since it can handle at least 10 trillion requests every day and has a support capability of up to 20 million per second. 

Amazon DynamoDB allows system developers to store various sizes of blocks of data and to identify them using unique key values. Service engineers can load the data at rapid rates of billions of daily records, hence capable of exceeding the performance and size of other databases. More so, Amazon DynamoDB supports the storage and processing of standard data formats, such as JSON. 

DynamoDB is provided as a service on AWS, and it is highly efficient for acquiring and releasing resources as needed. Moreover, users don't require to demonstrate knowledge of usage of the underlying infrastructure, such as storage systems and servers. Besides, the professional operational staff is responsible for maintaining Amazon DynamoDB. Users do not, therefore, need to understand various concepts, such as software upgrades, backup and recovery, and database tuning.

What are the benefits? 

1. No server management: Amazon DynamoDB is serverless, and users do not require to provision, manage, or patch the servers. It is also designed to automatically scale down or up to maintain high performance and adapt according to capacity. Moreover, fault tolerance and database availability are inbuilt, thus saving users the difficulties associated with architecting applications to the capabilities. Also, Amazon DynamoDB provides on-demand and provisioned capacity methods to enable cost optimization since users can specify the capacity for each workload and pay for the consumed resources.
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2. It is enterprise-ready: Amazon DynamoDB supports ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) database transactions, enabling users to develop applications at scale. It has a default data encryption scheme and provides fine-grained access and identity control of a user's database tables. Users can also create backups of any data size without impacting the performance of the tables. A service level agreement guarantees the availability of the Amazon DynamoDB. 
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3. Auto-scaling performance: Amazon DynamoDB supports some applications with the most significant number of users by providing single-digit millisecond, consistent response times to any scale. Users can hence develop applications without restrictions on storage and throughput. Furthermore, Amazon DynamoDB global tables allow users to replicate data across various AWS regions, thus providing instantaneous data access to globally distributed applications. 

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Common use cases 

Gaming 

Gaming companies use Amazon DynamoDB in multiple applications in various game platforms and capabilities. These include leaderboards, session history, player data, and game state. The companies leverage the Amazon DynamoDB benefits, such as reliable scaling of millions of concurrent requests and users while ensuring the measuring of a single-digit millisecond and consistently low latency. Additionally, since it is fully managed, Amazon DynamoDB does not provide operational overheads. As such, developers can concentrate on game development instead of database management. More importantly, game developers look to expand across multiple AWS regions and can rely on Amazon DynamoDB global tables for active data replication. 

Ad Tech

Technological advertising companies rely on Amazon DynamoDB key-value store for storing a variety of marketing data. The data includes user events, user profiles, visited links, and clicks. Applicable use-cases in ad tech include attribution, ad targeting, and real-time bidding. Such use cases have a high request rate, and ad companies use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) when there are high read volumes or the need for sub-millisecond read latency. 

Retail

Companies in the retail sector deploy DynamoDB service to deliver low latency for their mission-critical workloads. The service offers capabilities for retailers to set up and manage shopping cards, inventory tracking, and customer accounts & profiles. 

Other areas of applications include media & entertainment, banking & finance, and software / Internet industries. 

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Customer experiences

Telltale Games and Duolingo shared their experience with Amazon DynamoDB service.

1. Telltale Games 

Telltale Games is an online gaming service that provides story-based games where players make decisions on behalf of the game characters. Some of the popular games under the company are The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Batman. Telltale uses Amazon DynamoDB to store the game events (recorded user decisions and the resulting consequences) and game content. Developers must continuously work on the story to remain ahead of the gamers. The data stored in Amazon DynamoDB is vital for the developers to understand the user actions, game direction, and choices.

2. Duolingo 

Duolingo is an online service for learning languages. It is a leading offering in the category and the most downloaded educational application in Android and iOS. The app guides users through the language learning process using a highly interactive and intuitive method. A learner's progress data, such as test scores, are stored in Amazon DynamoDB and are used to forecast the student's future outcomes and inform them of whether to accelerate or slow down the learning process.

A lot of other global businesses running their mission-critical workloads on Amazon DynamoDB include Redfin, Lyft, Airbnb, Samsung, and Toyota. 

Getting Started with Technofy 

Technofy provides teams with AWS consulting, architecture, and infrastructure guidance to develop and implement a complete cloud strategy and education on the latest cloud techniques. As your DevOps partner, Technofy helps you deploy AWS services like Amazon Dynamo, a fast and scalable NoSQL database service, to ensure that your scale applications meet your customers' request capacity.   

You can book a free consultation to explore the next cloud revolution with Technofy.