A Decade of Innovation in Amazon DynamoDB, a Cloud-Native Database

The Dynamo paper published by Amazon in 2007 is considered to be the inaugural work of NoSQL databases, and has had a crucial influence on the development of NoSQL in the following ten years. In 2012, DynamoDB, derived from the Amazon Dynamo paper, was officially launched and began to provide Amazon Cloud Technology customers with a cloud-native database service with extreme performance and scalability. At the just-concluded 10th Anniversary Online Conference of Cloud Native Database, we reviewed the development of DynamoDB in the past ten years. Amazon DynamoDB has helped a large number of customers in industries such as games, advertising, wearable devices, smart home and Internet software to achieve globalization. The goal of Internet expansion.

As a cloud-native serverless architecture database service, DynamoDB not only provides users with extreme elasticity, availability and performance, but also provides features such as global tables, transaction support, and local deployment testing to help users meet the needs of higher-demand scenarios. .

Amazon DynamoDB is a key/value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance in environments of any scale. It is a fully managed, multi-region, multi-active persistent database with built-in security, backup and recovery, and in-memory caching for Internet-scale applications. DynamoDB can handle over 10 trillion requests per day and can support peaks of over 20 million requests per second.

Many of the world's fastest-growing businesses, such as Lyft, Airbnb, and Redfin, as well as businesses such as Samsung, Toyota, and Capital One, rely on DynamoDB for the scale and performance to support their mission-critical workloads. Hundreds of thousands of Amazon Cloud Technologies customers choose DynamoDB as their key-value and document database for their mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, IoT, and other applications that require low-latency data access at any scale. Create a new table for your application and leave the rest to DynamoDB.

Extreme performance at any scale

DynamoDB supports some of the world's largest applications by delivering consistent single-digit millisecond response times in any-scale environments. You can build applications with virtually unlimited throughput and storage. DynamoDB global tables replicate your data across multiple Amazon Cloud regions, giving you fast local access to data for globally distributed applications. For use cases that require faster access with microsecond latency, DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) provides a fully managed in-memory cache.

No need to manage servers

DynamoDB is a serverless service, requiring no servers to provision, patch, or manage, and no software to install, maintain, or operate. DynamoDB automatically scales up and down tables to adjust for capacity and maintain performance. With built-in availability and fault tolerance, you don't need to build applications for these features. DynamoDB offers provisioned and on-demand capacity models that allow you to optimize costs by specifying capacity per workload or only paying for the resources you use.

Enterprise feature support

DynamoDB supports ACID transactions, enabling you to build business-critical applications at scale. DynamoDB encrypts all data by default and provides fine-grained identity and access control for all of your tables. You can instantly create full backups of hundreds of terabytes of data without impacting your table performance, and restore to any point in the previous 35 days without downtime. You can also export Amazon DynamoDB table data to a lake warehouse in Amazon S3 to perform analytics at any scale. DynamoDB also provides a service level agreement to ensure availability.

Gaming companies use DynamoDB for a variety of features in gaming platforms, including game state, player data, session history, and leaderboards. The main advantage these companies get from DynamoDB is the ability to reliably scale to millions of concurrent users and demands, while ensuring consistently low single-digit millisecond latency. Additionally, as a fully managed service, DynamoDB greatly reduces operational costs, so game developers can focus on developing the game itself rather than managing the database. Additionally, as more developers look to scale from a single Amazon Cloud Technology region to multiple Amazon Cloud Technology regions, they can rely on DynamoDB Multi-Region Global Tables for bi-directional active data replication.

Finland-based Supercell, founded in 2010 by six game industry veterans, is one of the fastest-growing social gaming companies in the world. The company employs more than 100 people and has developed three highly successful games that attract tens of millions of players every day on iOS and Android devices. The three games are Cartoon Farm (a social farming game), Clash of Clans and Boom Beach.

"Amazon DynamoDB is a great choice for use cases like ours where scalability and speed are critical," said Sami Yliharju, Director of Services at Supercell.

Frontier Developments uses DynamoDB to deploy MMO experiences that are sold and distributed globally across platforms such as PC and console. Between as many as 825,000 (and counting) elite perilous players, every action performed by each player drives the story of this comprehensive game, which also brings enormous concurrency to the database. pressure.
"We got 400 billion galaxies and an increasing number of players. We are confident in the number of reads and writes to this dataset because it depends on the players who are online at this moment. It's a great fit for DynamoDB, so to speak. We included it in DynamoDB, responsible for our storage expansion." - Dav Stott, Senior Server Development Engineer at Elite Dangerous.

Zynga is one of the most successful mobile gaming companies in the world, with many popular titles — including Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, FarmVille, and more — installed by more than a billion players worldwide to date. By migrating Poker Game from MySQL to fully managed Amazon DynamoDB, Zynga saved a lot of operational overhead and achieved a huge performance boost, with queries that previously took 30 seconds now take a second to complete.

Smart home/smart device companies rely on DynamoDB to meet their high concurrency and O&M-free needs. Tens of millions of smart terminals around the world need to send data at the same time, which generates a lot of concurrency and storage pressure on the database side. DynamoDB can provide extreme elasticity and consistent performance that traditional database services do not have, helping our users to fully focus on the development of the business system itself , to achieve the goals of rapid deployment, stability and reliability, privacy and security, and flexible operation.

Founded in 2013, Huami Technology is a cloud-based health service provider with world-leading smart wearable technology. The smart wearable devices it produces have nearly 100 million users worldwide.

Huami Technology Health Cloud provides stable basic support services and value-added services for the operation of the entire health ecosystem. To complete tens of billions of requests and TB-level data storage requirements every day, not only the amount of stored data needs to be huge, but it must also ensure Extremely high data security and low latency response. Before the use of Amazon cloud technology, the biggest challenge of this task was that the stability could not be guaranteed. By migrating to DynamoDB as the core database, Huami Technology has successfully solved this problem, realizing safe, stable, reliable and low-latency data storage. The biggest benefit of DynamoDB is that it can provide a consistent response time with a delay of no more than 10 milliseconds at any scale, and it can be used to build applications with unlimited throughput and storage space, which well meets the data storage of Huami Technology Health Cloud need.

Tianherong is also a well-known domestic smart home manufacturer. In 2017, Tianherong's product, Shitong, has entered the market in major geographic regions around the world, and a demand that arises is to use Shitong Cloud in various regions. Customers of the service provide a consistent user experience. In 2019, Tianherong began to apply the concept of Serverless (serverless) to the existing architecture. The use of services such as DynamoDB and Lambda, on the one hand, makes the back-end services more fine-grained, reduces the interference between various parts of the back-end, and ensures service stability; on the other hand, the operation and maintenance level is also more refined, including scaling Capacity, billing, etc. can be refined to the level of 100 milliseconds, making cost estimation more convenient.

Media and entertainment companies rely on DynamoDB for high throughput and parallelism, low latency, and reliability. DynamoDB supports elastic scaling, can handle excessive load and maintain low latency, meeting important needs in real-time scenarios such as video streaming and interactive content. In these scenarios, the number of concurrent users can be in the millions, and no other database can handle such parallel tasks as smoothly as DynamoDB. Whether retrieving media or engaging in real-time interactions, maintain high parallelism while maintaining low latency and providing an optimized user experience for each user. These companies use DynamoDB to solve their scaling problems and focus on feature development rather than database administration.

Disney+, one of the world's largest online video streaming platforms, launched in November 2019 and is the primary streaming platform for Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic content. Disney+ provides a rich library of digital content directly to more than 100 million subscribers, and Amazon DynamoDB is one of the technologies that power this global service.
The content discovery team behind Disney+ uses DynamoDB global tables to scale and provide popular features like Continue Watching, Watch List, and Personalized Recommendations.

Dropbox is a cloud synchronization company that helps users synchronize data between different terminals.
Dropbox ran into insufficient capacity in its local MySQL metadata store and needed to migrate or delete terabytes of metadata to avoid doubling storage costs. The company quickly prototyped and migrated hot and cold metadata to a new storage system built using Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3. The storage capacity of the system is currently 300TB and will continue to grow thereafter. Amazon DynamoDB's increased the system's query capability to 600,000 queries per second, while saving Dropbox millions of dollars in scaling costs and significantly reducing cost per user GB by using Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3.

Innovation continues. At the global cloud computing technology event - Amazon Cloud Technology re:Invent 2021, Amazon Cloud Technology continued to provide Standard-Infrequent Access standard infrequent access table classes for Amazon DynamoDB, helping users to further save up to 60% in historical archive data scenarios the cost of. We are also excited to see more and more users start their journey of innovation on the cloud through Amazon Cloud Technology.