Know before you go: Amazon DynamoDB sessions at AWS re:Invent 2023

It’s November, which means that AWS re:Invent 2023 is just around the corner! We’ve summarized a list of re:Invent sessions that include Amazon DynamoDB. We encourage readers who are interested in learning more about DynamoDB to bookmark this list to simplify how you schedule your conference week in Las Vegas this year.

Keynotes and leadership sessions

Hear from AWS leaders about the latest innovations and trends in cloud computing.

Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AWS Data and Machine Learning
KEY003, Keynote
Wednesday, November 29, 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Join Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and AI at AWS, to discover how you can use your company data to build differentiated generative AI applications and accelerate productivity for employees across your organization. Also hear from customer speakers with real-world examples of how they’ve used their data to support their generative AI use cases and create new experiences for their customers.

Jeff Carter, Vice President, Relational Databases and Migrations at AWS
Rahul Pathak, Vice President of Relational Databases at AWS
Future-proofing your applications with AWS databases
DAT212-L, Leadership session
Wednesday, November 29, 2:30 PM – 3:50 PM
In this talk, Jeff Carter, Vice President of Databases and Migrations at AWS, and Rahul Pathak, Vice President of Relational Databases at AWS, address strategies for safeguarding your data against any type of disruption, positioning your organization to easily adopt new technologies, like generative AI, and use near-real-time analytics with zero-ETL integrations. AWS databases offer a change-friendly approach that helps you take advantage of innovation.

Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon.com Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
KEY005, Keynote
Thursday, December 1, 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Join Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon.com’s VP and CTO, for his twelfth re:Invent appearance. In his keynote, he covers best practices for designing resilient and cost-aware architectures. He also discusses why artificial intelligence is something every builder must consider when developing systems and the impact this will have in our world.

Data modeling

Take advantage of sessions that cover data modeling for users new to DynamoDB and those who want to learn advanced techniques.

Data modeling core concepts for Amazon DynamoDB
DAT329, Breakout session
Monday, November 27, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Developers experienced with Amazon DynamoDB can join this session to learn the core concepts of DynamoDB data modeling. Explore best practices for common access patterns used by DynamoDB customers for applications that need consistent, fast performance at any scale. Learn best practices and trade-offs to make when deciding on single-table and multi-table designs, indexing strategies, and more.

Dos and don’ts of NoSQL data modeling
BOA315, Chalk talk
Monday, November 27, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
When traditional RDBMS databases can’t scale as needed, organizations often turn to NoSQL databases. One of the main challenges in adopting a NoSQL database is data modeling, because it requires a deep and upfront understanding of the data access patterns. In this chalk talk, learn about the fundamental steps for building a data model in NoSQL, how to work backwards from the access patterns, and common pitfalls that you should know about. This talk also covers the different types of NoSQL database offerings on AWS.

Dive deep into Amazon DynamoDB using design puzzles
DAT316, Chalk talk
Monday, November 27, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
In this chalk talk, dive deep into how Amazon DynamoDB works at scale by collaboratively solving a few design puzzles that may seem simple but are actually complex. By understanding how DynamoDB operates, learn how you can look beyond the obvious solution to find a more effective and scalable one.

Composable architecture using Amazon DynamoDB and domain-driven design
COM304, Breakout session
Tuesday, November 28, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Enterprises building software often face multiple setbacks in the software lifecycle due to domain complexity, unclear application boundaries, and a disconnect between business needs and implemented software. Following domain-driven design (DDD) practices can help you navigate complex business domains and avoid common pitfalls. In this session, learn the core DDD concepts of ubiquitous language, aggregates, and bounded context and how the Amazon DynamoDB single-table design process fits into recommendations of aggregates.

Advanced data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB
DAT410, Breakout session
Wednesday, November 29, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Amazon DynamoDB is a popular choice for modern applications, as it is a serverless database that provides single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. Optimizing your usage of DynamoDB requires a different approach to data modeling than traditional relational databases. In this session, AWS Data Hero Alex DeBrie shows you advanced techniques to get the most out of DynamoDB. Learn how to “think in DynamoDB” by learning the DynamoDB foundations and principles for data modeling. Further, learn practical strategies and DynamoDB features to handle difficult use cases in your application.

Multi-Region

These sessions will highlight architecture patterns that help customers navigate considerations for designing multi-Region workloads with DynamoDB.

Architecting critical multi-Region, active/active financial systems
FSI301, Chalk talk
Monday, November 27, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Financial services organizations are modernizing financial systems on AWS to keep pace with increasing transaction volume, customer expectations, and regulations. But how do you ensure these mission-critical systems remain resilient and highly available if failures happen? In this chalk talk, learn about the design considerations and architecture patterns of a multi-Region, active/active microservices-based transaction processing system using Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda. Discover how to use observability and recovery techniques to handle gray failure and improve overall resiliency posture while lowering the overall recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

Multi-Region or single-Region? Considerations and architectures
ARC401, Chalk talk
Tuesday, November 28, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
With AWS, builders can create highly resilient workloads in the cloud. In this chalk talk, learn about how to reason about single-Region and multi-Region architectures. This talk walks through and whiteboards architectures that take advantage of AWS services that support multi-Region capabilities and explores what a failover scenario would look like in real life. Leave with an understanding of what it takes to run multi-Region on AWS.

Best practices for creating multi-Region architectures on AWS
ARC308, Breakout session
Tuesday, November 28, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Architecting and building a multi-Region architecture can come with a new set of challenges. These challenges include how to manage dependencies, infrastructure deployments, data replication, consistency, observability, testing, and operations. Whether you’re needing to expand to multiple Regions to improve resilience, adhere to governmental data regulations, or improve end-user latency, this session highlights best practices, design principles, and sample architectures to help you meet your requirements.

Build highly resilient multi-Region databases for financial services
FSI313, Chalk talk
Tuesday, November 28, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Financial institutions must meet a high bar for operational resilience, business continuity, and risk management. Regulations require these organizations to maintain adequate capacity, integrity, resilience, availability, and security of critical systems and encourage geographic diversity of physical facilities for disaster recovery. In this chalk talk, gain a deeper understanding of the considerations, tools, and techniques required to build resilient and scalable multi-Region database architectures based on insights from working with financial services customers. Explore patterns for successful multi-Region replication, failover, and switchback strategies using managed services like Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Secrets Manager, and AWS KMS.

Building highly resilient applications with Amazon DynamoDB
DAT333, Breakout session
Thursday, November 30, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Join this session to explore how resiliency features of Amazon DynamoDB help you build scalable, reliable applications. Learn how to prepare for the unexpected with DynamoDB capabilities like redundant storage, automatic throughput scaling, and multi-active, multi-Region data replication to achieve your business continuity goals at scale. Additionally, Amazon Advertising shares why they chose to migrate to DynamoDB for their most critical workloads and discusses their technical and architectural approaches to achieving the highest level of resiliency.

Integrations

DynamoDB provides the flexibility to integrate with a broad range of AWS services to simplify how you build and run applications in the cloud.

Deep dive into Amazon DynamoDB
DAT330, Breakout session
Tuesday, November 28, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
This session provides a deep dive into Amazon DynamoDB, and it shares insights into how DynamoDB is architected to deliver the scalability and response times that customers have come to expect. Learn how popular capabilities like on-demand capacity, global tables, DynamoDB Streams, and transactions work and how you can best take advantage of them in your workloads.

Advanced integration patterns with Amazon DynamoDB
DAT339, Breakout session
Wednesday, November 29, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Making the most of your data often means using multiple AWS services, such as Amazon OpenSearch Service for full-text, geospatial, or vector search. Amazon DynamoDB offers many different ways to build integrations, including export functionality and DynamoDB Streams. In this session, explore different architecture patterns and sample implementations, including an end-to-end vector search example, to understand best practices when integrating from DynamoDB.

Build a web-scale application with purpose-built databases & analytics
DAT403, Workshop
Wednesday, November 29, 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM
In this workshop, learn to build modern web applications at scale using purpose-built databases. Discover how to apply development patterns using Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon OpenSearch Service to build a fully functional and scalable bookstore ecommerce application and dive deep into best practices along the way. Basic familiarity with AWS concepts and services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon VPC, networking, and storage services is recommended. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Designing your serverless API workloads for massive scale
SVS321, Chalk talk
Wednesday, November 29, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Learn to architect your serverless API workloads on AWS to scale to meet virtually any demand while also reducing your operational overhead. This chalk talk discusses key design principles for Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB to achieve massive scale. Learn how to apply the techniques of asynchronous processing, caching, rate limiting, and performance optimization to evolve a real-world architecture to seamlessly handle large bursts of traffic. This talk includes an in-depth Q&A session throughout.

How to add Amazon DynamoDB to your web application
DAT412, Code talk
Wednesday, November 29, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Amazon DynamoDB provides developers with a fast, flexible, serverless database service that can be integrated into an existing web application. In this code talk, learn about the React web application that reads and writes to MySQL, and then get an introduction to using JavaScript functions to access DynamoDB instead. Also, explore advanced design patterns such as aggregations and parallel queries.

Securely share PII data with a one-time password solution
FSI318, Chalk talk
Wednesday, November 29, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
As data sharing across accounts and companies becomes more prevalent in financial services, institutions need to be able to share personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive data in a secure way. In this chalk talk, learn how to secure APIs with a one-time password token, which is used to validate that API calls are coming from a trusted source. Discover how services such as AWS KMS, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB can simplify your PCI DSS footprint. Also, learn how services such as AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS Payment Cryptography can increase your application security.

Securing your customer data with the AWS Database Encryption SDK
SEC312, Code talk
Wednesday, November 29, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
While client-side encryption provides end-to-end protection for your data, in transit and at rest, to help ensure confidentiality and data integrity, it also comes with a usability drawback: once encrypted, the data is difficult to share, validate, and search through. In this code talk, learn how you can tackle these challenges with the AWS Database Encryption SDK for client-side encryption. Examples demonstrate how you can use the AWS Database Encryption SDK to encrypt the values of attributes using Amazon DynamoDB, manage encryption keys using AWS KMS, and create queries to filter and search on encrypted data.

Advanced caching design patterns with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
DAT309, Chalk talk
Thursday, November 30, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Many Redis users appreciate the fully managed service Amazon ElastiCache for Redis for the unique features that it provides. In this chalk talk, dive deep into caching strategies in ElastiCache. Also, learn how you can implement cache invalidations on complex relational tables, how to use ElastiCache with Amazon DynamoDB Streams to materialize cached views of DynamoDB tables, and how to properly measure the performance of your caching solution. The talk includes whiteboarding the data access models and data paths.

Customer sessions

Learn how customers are building secure and highly scalable workloads on AWS with DynamoDB.

Northvolt’s software-defined factories
MFG202, Breakout session
Monday, November 27, 1:00-2:00PM
Northvolt aims to become Europe’s largest producer of sustainable battery solutions and gigafactories. Northvolt uses AWS for its “Platform” initiative, which includes their Connected Factory and Battery Systems cloud platforms, as well as hosting their PLM system. Their factory blueprint harnesses technology, data, and automation across their factory operations (such as production lines, IT, and more) to enable a “factory as code” solution to speed the deployment of new facilities as they rapidly expand. Northvolt has also used advanced analytics, simulation techniques, and applied AI on the production line. Learn how Northvolt has improved productivity and quality while reducing time to market.

Capital One: Achieving resiliency to run mission-critical applications
FSI314, Breakout session
Monday, November 27, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Take a technical deep dive into Capital One’s approach to running distributed systems. Explore patterns for realizing the reliability, resiliency, and eventual consistency needed to run mission-critical financial services applications on AWS. Learn techniques to keep systems running when dependencies fail, and gain an understanding of how to operate safely at scale, including driving continual improvement through chaos engineering and site reliability engineering. Explore examples of event, streaming, and batch processing, focusing on multi-Region services including Amazon Route 53, AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Aurora.

How Santander built a cloud-native trading platform at scale
FSI311, Breakout session
Wednesday, November 29, 11:30 AM – 12:30 AM
Running mission-critical trading systems requires keeping pace with new market demands and regulatory requirements. But Santander Corporate & Investment Banking’s (Santander CIB’s) rigid on-premises trading solution offered limited flexibility and product development capabilities. In this session, learn how Santander CIB addressed these challenges by building a scalable, cloud-native trading platform using serverless microservices. Gain insights into the technical architecture that allows Santander CIB to support algorithmic trading, multiple products and trading desks, and ultimately its global business. Discover how the platform takes advantage of AWS services, including Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and Amazon DynamoDB, to achieve greater business agility while significantly lowering costs.

More DynamoDB sessions

To find all the re:Invent 2023 sessions featuring DynamoDB from tracks like Serverless, SaaS, Architecture, Financial Services, and others, visit the re:Invent 2023 Session Catalog and choose Amazon DynamoDB under Services.

About the author

Jason Laschewer is an Outbound Product Manager on the Amazon DynamoDB team. Jason has held a number of Business Development roles in non-relational databases at AWS. Outside of work, Jason enjoys seeing live music, cooking, and spending time with his wife and three children in NY.