Chapter 7
DynamoDB

Earth movers are epic pieces of machinery, able to shuffle around massive bits of dirt and other materials with great ease. DynamoDB is a bit like the rented earth mover of NoSQL databases. You don’t have to build it yourself or fix it when it’s broken; you just have to drive it and pay for your usage. But it’s complex to handle so you’ll need to make very intelligent decisions about how to use it lest you end up incurring unexpected costs or jamming the engine.

DynamoDB is a cloud-based database available through Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division of e-commerce giant Amazon (the same Amazon from which you may have purchased this book). You may know AWS as the creator of a dizzying, ever-expanding array of widely used cloud services, from the Simple Storage Service (S3) to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and far beyond (there could be over 100 services by the time you read this).

Despite the emergence of serious competitors, such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, AWS remains the leader of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) paradigm that has brought cloud computing to the masses, and DynamoDB is AWS’s most significant contribution—thus far—to the world of NoSQL. The cloud has opened vast new horizons for everyone from lone-wolf developers to Fortune 500 companies, and any book on the NoSQL paradigm would be incomplete without this pioneering cloud database.