Overview of building resilient applications with Amazon DynamoDB global tables

AWS Senior Principal Solutions Architect Randy DeFauw has written a four-part series about how to use Amazon DynamoDB global tables as part of your strategy to build resilient, multi-Region applications that have the lowest possible recovery time objective and recovery point objective. This post summarizes each post in the series and provides a single link that you can use for bookmarking and sharing.

Part 1 – Sample application, AWS Regions, and availability

In Part 1, you’re introduced to a sample application; an overview of zonal, Regional, and global services; and how to calculate availability based on service level agreements (SLAs) and table distribution across Regions and Availability Zones.

Part 2 – DynamoDB and multi-Region design

Part 2 discusses how characteristics of DynamoDB tables affect multi-Region design. It includes a review of DynamoDB tables in a single Region and the characteristics of global tables that you need to be aware of when developing a multi-Region design.

Part 3 – Design patterns

Part 3 introduces a design pattern for building a resilient application using DynamoDB global tables. You’ll learn about two important design choices and have some sample code that you can use to test the design.

Part 4 – Observability, deployment pipelines, and runbooks

Part 4 completes the series. You’ll start with a discussion of observability including canary metrics and dashboards. Then move on to options for designing a deployment pipeline for your application. The post finishes with a discussion of using operational runbooks to automate your response to events that might require rebalancing traffic across Regions to maintain availability.

Summary

Start applying resilience patterns and best practices introduced in this series to your business-critical applications that use DynamoDB by visiting the DynamoDB global tables Getting Started page and reviewing Parts 1–4 of this post.

Author bio

Darcy Jayne is a Technical Writer on the AWS DynamoDB team. She has a background in system administration and has been a technical writer and editor for multiple companies. Before joining DynamoDB, she was a member of the AWS Security Blog editorial team. Outside of work, her favorite hobbies are reading, enjoying a good meal, and spending time hiking in the mountains of Washington state.