Amazon DynamoDB session videos from AWS re:Invent 2020

This blog post includes links to the videos from the keynotes and Amazon DynamoDB sessions presented during AWS re:Invent 2020. This year’s conference was free and completely virtual, and featured 11 sessions about DynamoDB: eight at the advanced level and three at the expert level. To give you some idea of where to start, Rick Houlihan’s two-part “DynamoDB advanced design patterns” and Alex DeBrie’s two-part “Data modeling with DynamoDB” are popular year-round on YouTube. You also can bookmark this YouTube playlist that includes all these videos.

The keynotes

AWS re:Invent 2020 Keynote with Andy Jassy

AWS CEO Andy Jassy shares his insights and the latest news about AWS customers, products, and services.

AWS re:Invent 2019 Keynote with Werner Vogels

AWS VP and CTO Dr. Werner Vogels shares his insights about solving today’s hardest technology problems, building resilient architectures, and the future of software development.

The DynamoDB sessions

Level 300 – Advanced

Data modeling with DynamoDB – Part 1 (Alex DeBrie, DAT305-PT1)

DynamoDB is popular because of its flexible billing model and ability to scale without performance degradation. It’s a common database choice in serverless and high-scale applications. But modeling your data with DynamoDB requires a different approach than modeling in traditional relational databases. Alex DeBrie is an AWS Data Hero, recognized for his work with DynamoDB, and author of The DynamoDB Book, a comprehensive guide to data modeling. In Part 1 of this two-part session, see how modeling with DynamoDB is different than modeling with a traditional relational database, and learn some foundational elements of data modeling with DynamoDB.

Data modeling with DynamoDB – Part 2 (Alex DeBrie, DAT305-PT2)

In the second part of this two-part session, learn more-advanced guiding principles from AWS Data Hero Alex DeBrie, including strategies for handling complex, highly relational data models that don’t slow down as your application scales.

Deliver business impact with feature-packed DynamoDB (Pete Naylor, DAT316)

DynamoDB offers an enterprise-ready database that helps you protect your time, your data, and your budget. In this session, review key features that help drive the most business impact, such as multi-Region, multi-primary replication with global tables, on-demand capacity mode for spiky workloads, and backup and restore, including point-in-time recovery that backs up your table data automatically for the preceding 35 days.

Dropbox cuts costs with cold metadata store using DynamoDB and Amazon S3 (Anuj Dewangan and Jonathan Lee, DAT313)

Dropbox was experiencing a capacity crunch in its on-premises MySQL metadata store, requiring it to migrate or delete several terabytes of metadata to avoid doubling storage costs. The company rapidly prototyped and migrated cold metadata to a new storage system built by using DynamoDB and Amazon S3—currently storing 300 TB of data and growing. This storage system leverages the scale and flexibility of DynamoDB and the cost savings of Amazon S3. The session’s first half focuses on an architectural review of the durability, availability, and scale of DynamoDB. Dropbox then explains the architecture and scaling mechanisms for its metadata storage system on AWS.

DynamoDB: Untold stories of databases in a serverless world (Angela Timofte, COM305)

Trustpilot has adopted a serverless mindset. Over the years, the company improved its software architecture by building serverless applications, which includes the important decision of choosing the right database. Today, DynamoDB is Trustpilot’s first choice when building new applications, but this wasn’t always the case. In this session, Trustpilot’s Angela Timofte discusses what the company learned working with DynamoDB in a serverless architecture, misconceptions the team had, and mistakes they made. Angela also provides examples of how to model your data in DynamoDB so that you can unlock its full potential. Finally, hear some of Trustpilot’s favorite tips learned throughout their database and serverless journey.

How Disney+ scales globally on Amazon DynamoDB (Attilio Giue, DAT304)

Disney+, one of the largest global online video streaming platforms, was launched in November 2019 as the home of Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. Disney+ delivers its extensive library of digital content directly to the homes of more than 60.5 million subscribers, and DynamoDB is one of the technologies that supports this global footprint. The Content Discovery team behind Disney+ uses DynamoDB global tables to scale and deliver popular features such as Continue Watching, Watchlist, and Personalized Recommendations. Hear from Disney+ about its use cases and learnings from using DynamoDB to meet customers’ needs at scale.

Model and access application data more efficiently with AWS Amplify (Stephen Johnson, FWM301)

The right data access pattern can significantly improve application performance to delight your end users. AWS Amplify helps front-end web and mobile developers use the power of GraphQL to model app data for faster production apps, with offline capabilities and Amplify DataStore, that can scale across platforms. In this session, learn how to create advanced data access patterns with the Amplify GraphQL transform library, powered by AWS AppSync and DynamoDB.

Unify access to siloed data with AWS AppSync GraphQL resolvers (Nader Dabit, FWM304)

Querying data across multiple sources can be complex and time consuming. AWS AppSync provides a rich set of GraphQL resolver mapping templates and utilities that make it easy to query, update, and subscribe to data changes in services such as DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, or Amazon OpenSearch Service, and any other data sources via AWS Lambda or Amazon API Gateway. This session provides an overview of these capabilities and shows how you can easily modify, extend, and test these proven templates. 

Level 400 – Expert

DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 1 (Rick Houlihan, DAT402-PT1)

Every year, AWS Principal Technologist Rick Houlihan leads this technical session dedicated to advanced users of DynamoDB. He explains design patterns and data models that are based on a collection of implementations and best practices used by a variety of customers to deliver highly scalable solutions for a range of business problems. In this first part of a two-part series, Rick discusses and demonstrates important concepts including partition sharding and index overloading, scalable graph processing, and managing distributed locks.

DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 2 (Rick Houlihan, DAT402-PT2)

In this second part of a two-part series, AWS Principal Technologist Rick Houlihan reviews more common design patterns for DynamoDB, a highly scalable NoSQL database. Rick demonstrates how to optimize shard keys to ensure even workload distribution, dives into global secondary index replication lag, and shows how to support operational analytics with DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda. Rick also shows how AWS AppSync can be used to stand up GraphQL APIs, and he demonstrates the performance benefits of single-table design.

How Stitch Fix is delivering personalized experiences (Madhu Nunna and Ujjwal Sarin, RET401)

How can organizations deliver dynamic personalized customer interactions? Hear how the platform engineering team at Stitch Fix is transforming customer interactions by delivering a highly concurrent and scalable solution for real-time product recommendations. Come away with an understanding of the architectural requirements for leveraging DynamoDB to optimize near-real-time machine learning workloads to deliver the right user experience.

About the author

Craig Liebendorfer is a senior technical editor at Amazon Web Services. He also runs the @DynamoDB Twitter handle.