New – Amazon DynamoDB lowers pricing for on-demand throughput and global tables

Over 1 million customers choose Amazon DynamoDB as their go-to NoSQL database for building high-performance, low-latency applications at any scale. The DynamoDB serverless architecture eliminates the overhead of operating and scaling databases, reducing costs and simplifying management, allowing you to focus on innovation, not infrastructure. DynamoDB provides seamless scalability as workloads grow from hundreds of users to hundreds of millions of users, or single AWS Regions to spanning multiple Regions.

Our continued engineering investments on how efficiently we can operate DynamoDB allow us to identify and pass on cost savings to you. Effective November 1, 2024, DynamoDB has reduced prices for on-demand throughput by 50% and global tables by up to 67%, making it more cost-effective than ever to build, scale, and optimize applications.

In this post, we discuss the benefits of these price reductions, on-demand mode, and global tables.

Price reductions

You can now get the same powerful functionality of DynamoDB on-demand throughput and global tables at significantly lower prices. Let’s dive into what this price drop means for you and how DynamoDB can power your applications at a new level of cost-efficiency:

• On-demand throughput pricing has been reduced by 50% – DynamoDB on-demand mode is now even more attractive, offering you a fully managed, serverless database experience that automatically scales in response to application traffic with no capacity planning required. On-demand mode’s capabilities like pay-per-request pricing, scale-to-zero, and no up-front costs help you save time and money while simplifying operations and improving performance at any scale. On-demand is a game changer for modern, serverless applications because it instantly accommodates workload requirements as they ramp up or down, eliminating the operational complexity of capacity management and database scaling. With this pricing change, most provisioned capacity workloads on DynamoDB today will achieve a lower price with on-demand mode.
• Global tables pricing has been reduced by up to 67% – Building globally distributed applications is now significantly more affordable. DynamoDB has reduced pricing for multi-Region replicated writes to match the pricing of single-Region writes, simplifying cost modeling and choosing the best architecture for your applications. For on-demand tables, this price change lowers replicated write pricing by 67%, and for tables using provisioned capacity, replicated write pricing has been reduced by 33%.

Whether you’re launching a new application or optimizing an existing one, these savings make DynamoDB an excellent choice for workloads of all sizes. You can now enjoy the power and flexibility of serverless, fully managed databases with global reach at an even lower cost—allowing you to focus more resources on driving innovation and growth.

DynamoDB on-demand

When we launched DynamoDB in 2012, provisioned capacity was the only throughput option available. Provisioned capacity requires you to predict and plan your throughput requirements. For provisioned tables, you must specify how much read and write throughput per second you require for your application, and you’re charged based on the hourly read and write capacity you have provisioned, not how much your application has consumed. In 2017, we added provisioned auto scaling to help improve scaling and utilization. Although it was effective, we learned that customers wanted a serverless experience where they don’t have to think about provisioned capacity utilization and how quickly auto scaling can respond to changes in traffic patterns. In 2018, we launched on-demand mode to provide a truly serverless database experience with pay-per-request billing and automatic scaling that doesn’t require capacity management and scaling configurations.

Both provisioned and on-demand billing modes use the same underlying infrastructure to achieve high availability, scale, reliability, and performance. The key differences are that on-demand is always 100% utilized due to pay-per-request billing and on-demand scales transparently, without needing to specify a scaling policy. As a result, many customers prefer the simplicity of on-demand mode to build modern, serverless applications that can start small and scale to millions of requests per second. Continually working backward from our customer feedback, in early 2024, we launched configurable maximum throughput for on-demand tables, an optional table-level setting that provides an additional layer of cost predictability and fine-grained control by allowing you to specify predefined maximum read or write (or both) throughput for on-demand tables. Recently, we introduced warm throughput to provide greater visibility on the number of read and write operations an on-demand table can instantaneously support, and also made it more straightforward to pre-warm DynamoDB tables for upcoming peak events, like new product launches or database migration, when throughput requirements can increase by 10 times, 100 times, or more.

While on-demand was previously cost-effective for spiky workloads, with this pricing change, most provisioned capacity workloads on DynamoDB today will achieve a lower price with on-demand mode. This pricing change is transformative because it makes on-demand the default and recommended mode for most DynamoDB workloads. Whether you’re running a new application or a well-established one, on-demand mode simplifies the operational experience, while providing seamless scalability and responsiveness to handle changes to your traffic pattern, making it an ideal solution for startups, growing applications, and established businesses looking to streamline costs without sacrificing performance.

The following are the key benefits of on-demand mode:

• No capacity planning – On-demand mode eliminates the need to predict capacity usage and pre-provision resources. Capacity planning and monitoring can be time-consuming, especially as traffic patterns change over time. With on-demand, there is no need to monitor your utilization, adjust capacity, or worry about over-provisioning or under-provisioning resources. On-demand simplifies operations and allows you to focus on building features for your customers.
• Automatic scaling – One of the greatest advantages of on-demand mode is its ability to automatically scale to meet your application demand. On-demand mode can instantly accommodate up to double the previous peak traffic on your table. If your workload drives more than double your previous peak on the table, DynamoDB automatically scales, which reduces the risk of throttling, where requests can be delayed or rejected if the table is unable to keep up. Whether traffic is surging for a major launch or fluctuating due to low weekly or seasonal demand, on-demand can quickly adjust based on actual traffic patterns to serve your workload. On-demand mode can serve millions of requests per second without capacity management, and once scaled, you can instantly achieve the same throughput again in the future without throttling.
• Usage-based pricing – Unlike provisioned capacity mode, where you pay for a fixed amount of throughput regardless of usage, with on-demand mode’s simple, pay-per-request pricing model, you don’t have to worry about idle capacity because you only pay for the capacity you actually use. You are billed per read or write request, so your costs directly reflect your actual usage.
• Scale to zero throughput cost – With DynamoDB, the throughput a table is a capable of serving at any given moment is decoupled from what you are billed. For example, an on-demand table may be capable of serving 20,000 reads and 20,000 writes per second (we call this warm throughput) based on your previous traffic pattern, but your application may only be consuming 1,000 reads and 1,000 writes per second (consumed throughput). In this scenario, you are only charged for the 1,000 reads and 1,000 writes that you actually consume, even though at any time, your application could scale up to the warm throughput of 20,000 reads and 20,000 writes per second without any scaling actions needed by the DynamoDB table. On the other hand, if you are driving zero traffic to your table, then with on-demand, you are not charged for any throughput; however, your application can readily consume the warm throughput that the table can serve. Therefore, your table maintains warm throughput for when your application needs it but can scale to zero throughput cost when you aren’t issuing any requests against the table.
• Serverless compatibility – DynamoDB on-demand coupled with other AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon CloudWatch, allows you to build a fully serverless application stack that can scale seamlessly and handle variable workloads efficiently without needing to manage infrastructure.

Global tables: Bringing data closer to your customers

Global tables provide a fully managed, multi-active, multi-Region data replication solution that delivers increased resiliency, improved business continuity, and 99.999% availability for globally distributed applications at any scale. Global tables automatically replicate your data across Regions, making it accessible to users around the world with low latency, high availability, and built-in resilience.

DynamoDB global tables are ideal for applications with globally dispersed users, including financial technology, ecommerce applications, social platforms, gaming, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, and use cases where users expect the highest levels of availability and resilience.

The following are the key benefits of global tables:

• High availability – Global tables are designed for 99.999% availability, providing multi-active, multi-Region capability without the need to perform a database failover. In the event that your application processing becomes interrupted in one Region, you can redirect your application to a replica table in another Region, delivering higher business continuity.
• Flexibility – Global tables eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting of replicating data across Regions. With a few clicks on the DynamoDB console or an API call, you can convert any single-Region table to a global table. You also can add or delete replicas to your existing global tables at any time, providing you the flexibility to move or replicate your data as your business requires. Because global tables use the same APIs as single-Region DynamoDB tables, you don’t have to rewrite or make any application changes as you expand globally.
• Fully managed, multi-Region replication – For businesses with global customers, performance and availability matter more than ever. With global tables, your data is automatically replicated across your chosen Regions, providing low-latency local access and enhanced user experience.
• Global reach, local performance – Global tables enable you to read and write your data locally, providing single-digit millisecond latency for globally distributed applications at any scale. Updates made to any Region are replicated to all other replicas in the global table, locating your data closer to your users and improving performance for global applications.

Conclusion

We have made DynamoDB even more cost-effective by reducing prices for on-demand throughput by 50% and global tables by up to 67%. Whether you are developing a new application, expanding to a global audience, or optimizing your cloud costs, the new DynamoDB pricing offers increased flexibility and substantial savings.

These pricing changes are already in effect, in all Regions, starting November 1, 2024, and will be automatically reflected in your monthly AWS bill. We’re excited about what these changes mean for customers and the value you can realize from DynamoDB. For more details, see Pricing for Amazon DynamoDB.

About the authors

Mazen Ali is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services. Mazen has an extensive background in product management and technology roles, an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, and is passionate about engaging with customers, shaping product strategy, and collaborating cross-functionally to build exceptional experiences. In his free time, Mazen enjoys traveling, reading, skiing, and hiking.

Joseph Idziorek is currently a Director of Product Management at Amazon Web Services. Joseph has over a decade of experience working in both relational and nonrelational database services and holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University. At AWS, Joseph leads product management for nonrelational database services including Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), Amazon MemoryDB, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon Timestream.