Introduction to Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless, key-value and document database designed to deliver single-digit-millisecond performance at any scale. It handles more than 10 trillion requests per day and can support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second. DynamoDB is the backbone of many high-profile AWS services and customers including Amazon.com, Lyft, Airbnb, and Capital One.

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Why DynamoDB?

Traditional relational databases scale vertically — you buy a bigger server when you need more capacity. DynamoDB scales horizontally by partitioning data across many servers automatically. This architecture delivers:

• Consistent single-digit-millisecond latency regardless of table size
• Virtually unlimited throughput and storage — no need to provision or manage servers
• Built-in high availability — data is replicated across three Availability Zones
• Serverless operations — no patching, no backups to schedule, no capacity planning

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Core Concepts

Tables

A DynamoDB table is a collection of items. Unlike a relational table, items in the same DynamoDB table can have different attributes (schema-less within the table).

Items