“Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology,” explains Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.
“Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS.”
“With DynamoDB, customers can now remove the operational headaches of managing distributed systems and deploy a non-relational database in a matter of minutes. DynamoDB automatically scales to enterprise needs, and is designed for rapid performance no matter the size of the database. Amazon DynamoDB is already in use by many teams and products within Amazon, including the Amazon.com advertising platform, Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb, and Kindle.”
With the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service, Amazon sets out to ensure extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a new DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, partitioning, or cluster scaling. To get started with Amazon DynamoDB, visit www.aws.amazon.com/DynamoDB .
Unlike DynamoDB, traditional databases are not designed to scale to the performance needs of modern applications, which can experience explosive growth and cause a single database to quickly reach its capacity limits. Mitigating this by distributing a workload across multiple database servers is complex and requires significant engineering expertise and time investment by application developers. Amazon DynamoDB addresses the problem of scalability by automatically partitioning and re-partitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding applications. Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB’s pay-as-you-go pricing enables customers to “dial in” and pay for only the resources they need.
Amazon DynamoDB also integrates with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Amazon EMR allows businesses to perform complex analytics of their large datasets using a hosted pay-as-you-go Hadoop framework on AWS. With the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, it is easy for customers to use Amazon EMR to analyze datasets stored in DynamoDB, archive the results in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while keeping the original dataset in DynamoDB intact. Businesses can also use Amazon EMR to access data in multiple stores (i.e. Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3), do complex analysis over this combined dataset, and store the results of this work in Amazon S3.
“DynamoDB is a truly revolutionary product which allows SmugMug to finally realize its goal of being 100% cloud-based,” said Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug. “I love how DynamoDB enables us to provision our desired throughput, and achieve low latency and seamless scale, even with our constantly growing workloads. Even though we have years of experience with large, complex architectures, we are happy to be finally out of the business of managing it ourselves, and to be using DynamoDB to get even higher performance and stability than we can achieve on our own. Most importantly, DynamoDB allows SmugMug to spend even more time and energy on what really matters — our product and customer experience.”
“DynamoDB solves our problem of distributing and storing high-volume writes in a straightforward and cost-effective way,” said Rob Storrs, Head of Engineering at Formspring. “Our rapid growth meant that we were spending significant resources managing our own large-scale database systems. DynamoDB gives us low latency and easy scalability, which allows us to keep our costs low and our engineers focused on building what our customers want. It’s another example of AWS listening to their customers and building services that solve real problems.”
“Prior to Amazon DynamoDB, many of our customers were forced to spend weeks forecasting, planning, and preparing their database deployments to perform well at peak loads,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of Database Services at Amazon Web Services. “DynamoDB makes those processes obsolete. Now businesses can quickly add capacity with a few clicks in the management console. During our private beta, we saw customers successfully scale up from 100s of writes per second to over 100,000 writes per second without having to change a single line of code. This level of elasticity, coupled with consistent performance, reduces the cost and the risk of building a fast-growing application.”
To get started with Amazon DynamoDB, visit www.aws.amazon.com/DynamoDB .
