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DyanmoDB is pretty much the opposite of magic.

It is a resource that can often be the right tool for the job but you really have to understand what the job is and carefully measure Dynamo up for what you are doing.

It is _easy_ to misunderstand or miss something that would make Dynamo hideously expensive for your use case.



What use cases would likely make it hideously expensive, in your view? Like, what are the red flags?


Hot keys are much lesser of an issue nowadays. It'd been a big one in old DDB architectures.

I'd say requiring scans or filters as opposed to queries is one of the biggest issues that can bite your pocket.

Think carefully about how you'll access your data later. You won't be able to change it drastically and cheaply later.


Hot keys are the primary one. They destroys your "average" calculations for your throughput.

Bulk loading data is the other gotcha I've run into. Had a beautiful use case for steady read performance of a batch dataset that was incredibly economical on Dynamo but the cost/time for loading the dataset into Dynamo was totally prohibitive.

Basically Dynamo is great for constant read/write of very small, randomly distributed documents. Once you are out of thay zone things can hey dicey fast.




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