DynamoDB truly is serverless - an incredible service you can build around and rely on with extremely low operational burden. But, as any AWS customer who is dependent on DynamoDB for production use at scale can attest, it is NOT zero-ops. You’ll need to learn about the available metrics, maintain awareness of limits (“quotas”) set up effective dashboard and alarms, make choices around capacity mode, storage class, auto scaling policy, backup and recovery plans, and perhaps even take multi-region considerations into account for business continuity or geo-diverse application users. When (not if) something goes wrong and you see impact at the application level, you’ll need to dig into the details and truly understand root cause and the best corrections to make as part of your process for continuous improvement.
Frankly, there is room for improvement in terms of making it easy to take care of all the responsibilities mentioned above - the sad truth is that many DynamoDB adopters end up learning the hard way. Internal to Amazon, there is a great wealth of DynamoDB operational experience which is not readily available to new external customers. A goal for High Bar Solutions is to evangelize best practices, share operational guidance broadly, and give DynamoDB customers a shorter (and much less bumpy) path to operational excellence with DynamoDB.
If you have questions about operating DynamoDB well, help is available. At High Bar Solutions, we want you to succeed with DynamoDB and we don’t want you to experience any painful surprises. Seeing something in your consumption of DynamoDB that you just can’t make sense of? Get informed answers before it comes back to bite you!