What is DynamoDB?

In the recent years data has acquired an all new meaning. With the advent of social media, mobility and data science, the amount of data that’s being generated is huge. Just to give you a perspective, over 300 hours of video data gets uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day, and this trend is only moving upwards. To keep pace with these challenges, the database technology has also evolved enormously in the recent years. Traditional relational databases can no longer support the speed, scale, and performance levels demanded by new applications that transact with this huge amount of data. This is where NoSQL databases come in to play. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed NoSQL database service that can scale on-demand to support virtually unlimited concurrent read/write operations, with response times in single-digit milliseconds. And these response times can be further brought down to microseconds with caching services like DAX or DynamoDB Accelerator. And we'll talk about this when we discuss DAX. With DynamoDB, you are able create your own DynamoDB tables with just a few clicks on the DyanmoDB console and instantly you have high-performance tables ready to scale to your needs. DynamoDB provides seamless scaling and predictable performance. It’s a serverless cloud database, meaning, you don’t have to specify how many servers you need or what backend infrastructure you need. All you must tell DynamoDB is how many table reads and how many tables writes your application will perform per second. That’s it and you are good to go. DynamoDB integrates well with other AWS services. And in this course, we’ll cover as many DynamoDB integration use-case examples as possible. So, by the end of this course, you’ll be fully equipped to tackle any DynamoDB integration challenges on your own. DynamoDB has little to no learning curve involved. So, you can learn DynamoDB real fast and start leveraging it in your applications. Having said that, there are some best practices of working with DynamoDB that we’ll explore in detail in this course. And these are very crucial to ensure that you get the best bang for the buck. I've seen many projects and came across many stories and blogs from people who have had mixed experiences with DynamoDB. And all I can say that this is mostly due to their own ignorance of the DynamoDB best practices. If you follow the best practices while designing or modeling your DynamoDB tables and while interacting with DynamoDB, DynamoDB will work like a charm for you. And, as you might already know, you’ll learn better by doing. So, before we get in to more details of DynamoDB, lets first have our environment set up so we are ready for the hands-on practice. We’ll do this in the very next lecture.