Amazon DynamoDB–related content from AWS re:Invent 2018

This blog post includes links to video recordings of the Amazon DynamoDB-related keynotes, announcements, and sessions from AWS re:Invent 2018. Video recordings were not made of workshops, chalk talks, or builders sessions.

The keynotes

AWS re:Invent 2018 Keynote with Andy Jassy (Wednesday, November 28)

Among other topics in his keynote, AWS CEO Andy Jassy discusses DynamoDB on-demand. With this new DynamoDB capacity model, you pay for only what you use.

AWS re:Invent 2018 Keynote with Werner Vogels (Thursday, November 29)

AWS VP and CTO Werner Vogels goes under the hood of some new and updated AWS services. He also dives deep into serverless computing and DynamoDB, and he talks about Skrillex.

Announcing…

Announcing Amazon DynamoDB Support for Transactions

DynamoDB now offers native, server-side support for transactions, simplifying the developer experience of making coordinated, all-or-nothing changes to multiple items both within and across tables. With support for transactions, developers can extend the scale, performance, and enterprise benefits of DynamoDB to a broader set of mission-critical workloads. Wener Vogels and DynamoDB GM Tony Petrossian explain.

Introducing DynamoDB On-Demand

DynamoDB on-demand is a flexible new billing option for DynamoDB capable of serving thousands of requests per second without requiring you to plan for capacity. On-demand offers simple, pay-per-request pricing for read and write requests so that you only pay for what you use, making it easy to balance costs and performance. If your traffic level hits a new peak, DynamoDB adapts rapidly to accommodate the workload. DynamoDB Senior Product Manager Kai Zhao explains how DynamoDB on-demand works (plus something about cats).

The sessions

DAT201 – A Deep Dive into What’s New for Amazon DynamoDB (Wednesday, November 28)

In this session, DynamoDB General Manager Tony Petrossian and DynamoDB Senior Manager Jeff Wierer cover newly announced features and provide an end-to-end view of recent innovations. They also share some customer success stories and use cases. (Download the DAT201 slide deck.)

DAT205-R1 – Databases on AWS: The Right Tool for the Right Job (Wednesday, November 28)

AWS VP of Nonrelational Databases Shawn Bice and Principal Product Manager Joseph Idziorek discuss a purpose-built strategy for databases, where you choose the right tool for the right job. Shawn and Joseph explain why your application should drive the requirements of a database, not the other way around. They also introduce AWS databases that are purpose-built for your application use cases.

DAT303 – Protecting Your Greatest Asset: Security Best Practices on DynamoDB (Monday, November 26)

Learn about the security features built into Amazon DynamoDB and how you can best use them to protect your data. AWS Principal Security Engineer Conor Cahill shows you how customers are using the available DynamoDB options for controlling access to their tables and the content stored within those tables. Conor also shows how customers are protecting the content in their tables with encryption and how they monitor access to their data. (Download the DAT303 slide deck.)

DAT314 – Migrating Your NoSQL Database to Amazon DynamoDB (Wednesday, November 28)

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) can help migrate databases from many supported data sources to supported targets. In this session, Product Manager Arun Thiagarajan reviews how the combination of AWS DMS and AWS SCT can help migrate your NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, to DynamoDB. Arun provides an overview of AWS DMS and AWS SCT, and he demonstrates migrating a sample Cassandra database into DynamoDB. (Download the DAT314 slide deck.)

DAT320 – Becoming a Nimble Giant: How Amazon DynamoDB Serves Nike at Scale (Tuesday, November 27)

In this session, learn how Nike Digital migrated their large clusters of Cassandra and Couchbase to fully managed Amazon DynamoDB. Nike Principal Architect Zack Owens and Lead Software Engineer Adam Farrell share how Cassandra and Couchbase proved to be operationally challenging for engineering teams and failed to meet the needs to scale up for high-traffic product launches. They discuss how the flexible DynamoDB data model allows Nike to focus on innovating for their consumer experiences without managing database clusters. They also share the best practices they learned about how to effectively use DynamoDB TTL, auto scaling, on-demand backups, point-in-time recovery, and adaptive capacity for applications that require scale, performance, and reliability to meet Nike’s business requirements.

DAT321 – Amazon DynamoDB Under the Hood: How We Built a Hyper-Scale Database (Monday, November 26)

Watch this session to learn how DynamoDB was built as the hyper-scale database for internet-scale applications. In January 2012, Amazon launched DynamoDB, a cloud-based NoSQL database service designed from the ground up to support extreme scale, with the security, availability, performance, and manageability needed to run mission-critical workloads. In this session, AWS Senior Principal Engineer Jaso Sorenson discloses for the first time the underpinnings of DynamoDB, and how we run a fully managed nonrelational database used by more than 100,000 customers. Jaso covers the underlying technical aspects of how an application works with DynamoDB for authentication, metadata, storage nodes, streams, backup, and global replication. (Download the DAT321 slide deck.)

DAT325 – How Oath Built a Multi-Region GDPR Application with Amazon DynamoDB (Wednesday, November 28)

As Oath, a Verizon company, prepared for GDPR compliance during integration of AOL and Yahoo! Internet properties, a global user consent and terms of service application was developed and deployed. The cloud-native service was deployed across multiple AWS Regions globally and leveraged DynamoDB global tables to enable data synchronization. The service was launched in April 2018, scaling to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of Oath users. Come to this session to learn more about how Oath was able to accomplish all of this. (Download the DAT325 slide deck.)

DAT332 – Why GE Aviation Migrated from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB (Monday, November 26)

GE Aviation sells $1.7 billion annually in parts and service through a customer portal called myGEAviation. To enhance the customer experience, the portal lets users input specific variables and build custom reports for later viewing. This application, called p-dataquery, was experiencing performance and scalability issues on their Cassandra database. In this session, GE Aviation discusses how it rearchitected p-dataquery by using DynamoDB to resolve those pain points. In addition, learn how GE was able to solve concurrency and capacity issues by using Amazon Elastic Container Service in their new architecture. (Download the DAT332 slide deck.)

DAT345 – How GumGum Migrated from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB (Monday, November 26)

GumGum recently moved to Amazon DynamoDB from Apache Cassandra. In this session, GumGum Lead Engineer Anirban Roy discusses the architecture and design decisions made in the process, including comparisons of different NoSQL database options. He also shares the justifications and steps taken in order to plan and complete the migration process. Finally, Anirban covers the benefits and outcome of the migration, including performance boost, cost savings, and maintenance reductions. (Download the DAT345 slide deck.)

DAT374 – [NEW LAUNCH!] Building Modern Apps Using Amazon DynamoDB Transactions

DynamoDB transactions enable developers to maintain the correctness of their data at scale by adding atomicity and isolation guarantees for multi-item conditional updates. With transactions, you can perform a batch of conditional operations including, PutItem, UpdateItem, and DeleteItem with guarantees. In this session, AWS Senior Software Development Manager Yossi Levanoni explains and shows how DynamoDB transactions works, the primary use cases it enables, and how to build modern applications that require transactions. (Download the DAT374 slide deck.)

DAT401 – Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (Tuesday, November 27)

In this expert-level session, NoSQL Principal Technologist Rick Houlihan discusses the patterns and data models used by Amazon.com to deliver highly scalable solutions for a wide variety of business problems. Rick also covers strategies for global secondary index sharding and index overloading, scalable graph processing with materialized queries, relational modeling with composite keys, and executing transactional workflows on DynamoDB. (Download the DAT401 slide deck.)

– Craig