Your guide to Amazon DynamoDB sessions, workshops, and chalk talks at AWS re:Invent 2019

Last updated: December 3, 2019

AWS re:Invent 2019 is almost here! This post includes a complete list of Amazon DynamoDB sessions, workshops, and chalk talks at AWS re:Invent 2019. Use the information on this page to help schedule your conference week in Las Vegas this year. If you still haven’t registered for re:Invent and need some help convincing your manager, consider using this trip justification letter.

Level 200—Introductory

ARC213-R – Architecture patterns for multi-region, active-active architecture

With global business, there is an ever-growing need to be able to implement multi-region, active-active architecture. However, this requires first-order thinking and attention not only to app and database design, but also to DNS, monitoring, and traffic shaping. Architecture complexity can increase rapidly, so you need to make multiple design tradeoffs. In this session, we discuss challenges and solutions using various AWS services and features such as DynamoDB global tables as well as open-source products.

ARV201-R1 – Create 3D web apps with AWS

3D immersive experiences are breathing new life into web applications, increasing customer engagement with brands, and improving productivity in the workplace. In this session, A1Control, a healthcare startup, shares how it leveraged Amazon Sumerian to easily create an engaging 3D simulation education application for patients with diabetes. You learn how to use Sumerian to compose a scene, add interactive elements using drag-and-drop tools or your own custom scripts, and integrate with AWS services such as AWS Lambda, AWS IoT Core, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Polly. You also see how completed scenes are distributed globally within minutes and are easily accessible via a browser.

DAT205 – How Verizon Media implemented push notification using Amazon DynamoDB

Verizon Media had to create a better, stronger, and faster push notification system to serve the requirements of iconic Verizon brands, fulfill push notification completion time of 27 million devices in less than three minutes, and consistently show the push “toast” on all users’ lock screens. Verizon decided to use Amazon DynamoDB and other AWS services such as Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon SQS in conjunction with its own Vespa search engine to power all the use cases of its brands. Verizon also uses Kubernetes to orchestrate microservices across many Amazon EC2 instances. Join this session to learn how Verizon has been able to accomplish all of this.

SVS223-R – Finding a home for your data in your serverless app

Where should your data live? Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)? Amazon DynamoDB? Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)? This decision has large implications on your overall serverless application architecture, performance, and cost. In this session, we look at all of the data options available to serverless developers and explain the benefits and downsides of each. By the end of the session, you’ll understand how to make the most of each data store option in your next serverless app.

Level 300—Advanced

AMZ301 – Amazon.com: Enterprise database migration at scale
Amazon.com has a long history in data. To reduce scaling risks and third-party dependencies it chose AWS database services like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). In this session, you learn how it focused on critical, customer-facing services that include the Amazon consumer and digital businesses’ largest database workloads. Learn how Amazon.com achieved database freedom with AWS. Additional topics include lessons learned, benefits realized, and how Amazon.com delivers the biggest peak retail events such as Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.

AMZ302 – Amazon Wallet: Increasing performance with DynamoDB
E-commerce buyers want to pay for goods and services easily and securely. In this session, learn how Amazon.com enables payments with Amazon Wallet Service (Wallet), which every Amazon customer around the world interacts with when making purchases on Amazon.com. With five billion daily transactions, Amazon customers add new payment methods, subscribe to services such as Amazon Prime, and use 1-Click Ordering. Learn how Amazon simplified scaling and storage management for Wallet while keeping costs in check and performance consistently high. Discover how Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and AWS CloudFormation were used to deliver this outcome.

ARC309-R – Hands-on: Building a multi-region, active-active solution

Do you need a highly available global application? Join us to build a global, multi-region, resilient architecture with containers and serverless with polyglot persistence databases. You must bring your own laptop and have an AWS account for this hands-on session. This workshop includes using an Amazon Route 53 domain, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Cognito, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Fargate, Amazon Aurora with AWS code services, and AWS Cloud9.

ARC316-R – Deploy and monitor a serverless application

When building serverless applications, you need to know the design tradeoffs for improving performance in addition to how well your application is performing. What are the bottlenecks, time sinks, and bugs? Amazon OpenSearch Service—with its ability to ingest, correlate search, and visualize data in near-real time from different sources—is an ideal solution. In this workshop, you build on a bookstore application and add detailed monitoring and tracing across the stack. You’ll flow data from Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda (via AWS X-Ray) to OpenSearch Service, build visualizations, identify performance problems, and implement performance improvements to the application.

ARC406-R – Building multi-region microservices
In this session, participate in a hands-on exercise where you create, verify, and test a serverless solution across multiple AWS Regions using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB global tables.

CMY304 – Data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB
Modeling your data in the Amazon DynamoDB database structure requires a different approach from modeling in traditional relational databases. Alex DeBrie has written a number of applications using DynamoDB and is the creator of DynamoDBGuide.com, a free resource for learning DynamoDB. In this session, we review the key principles of modeling your DynamoDB tables and teach you some practical patterns to use in your data models. Leave this session with steps to follow and principles to guide you as you work with DynamoDB.

DAT301-R – Data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB in 60 minutes
Amazon DynamoDB is a nonrelational database that delivers reliable performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multiregion, multimaster database that provides consistent, single-digit millisecond latency, and it offers built-in security, backup, restore, and in-memory caching. Come to this session to learn how to build internet-scale apps with DynamoDB. (Note that this session is repeated four times during the week.)

DAT303 – Data security best practices on Amazon DynamoDB
In this session, learn about the security features built into Amazon DynamoDB and how you can use them to protect your data. We show you how customers are using the available options for controlling access to their tables and the content stored within those tables. We also show you how customers are protecting the contents of their tables with encryption and how they monitor access to their data.

DAT304 – Scale fearlessly with Amazon DynamoDB adaptive capacity
Planning to run spiky or unpredictable workloads? Worried that your traffic isn’t evenly distributed? In this session, learn how Amazon DynamoDB accommodates imbalanced workloads without throttling and how you can ensure optimal performance at any scale. First, we briefly cover DynamoDB fundamentals and recent innovations. Then, we dive deeply into how DynamoDB shards your data, what is new with adaptive capacity, and the latest workload monitoring tools.

DAT305-R – Real-world use cases for Amazon DynamoDB
Build or test your Amazon DynamoDB chops in this chalk talk, where we work together to design data models and solutions for real-world use cases using DynamoDB. Share your experiences and best practices, and ask questions of DynamoDB experts. (Note that this chalk talk is repeated once during the week.)

DAT306-R – Implement microservice architectures with Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda
In this chalk talk, we start with building blocks for reliable event delivery in microservice architectures using Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda. We then discuss how to use these building blocks to implement eventually consistent transactional behavior and support for querying using a Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern in serverless microservices. Along the way, we discuss the tradeoffs and benefits of event-driven designs over request/response designs, and we go into the details of tuning DynamoDB-based and Lambda-based reliable delivery and processing pipelines for scale, performance, and cost. (Note that this chalk talk is repeated once during the week.)

DAT313 – How Lambda256 developed a major blockchain platform with AWS databases
Lambda256 is one of Asia’s largest blockchain-as-a-service platforms built on AWS, provisioning Ethereum, Hyperledger, Luniverse mainnet, and other major protocols. Come to this session to learn how Lambda256 supports a large number of customers on its crypto exchange platform and to hear the rationale behind why Lambda256 chose AWS databases with which to build its platform.

DAT319 – How Uber stores financial transactions in ledgers using Amazon DynamoDB
Each day, millions of people move around the world with Uber. The associated financial transactions are stored in Uber’s Ledger Store with provable completeness backed by Amazon DynamoDB. In this session, we discuss why provable completeness is key for compliant storage of financial and other ledger-like use cases, and we explain how this can be implemented at global scale by using DynamoDB.

DAT324 – [NEW LAUNCH!] Introducing Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service
Apache Cassandra is a popular, wide-column, nonrelational database that can be used to store, retrieve, and manage large amounts of data. However, managing large Cassandra clusters can be difficult and complex. Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service is a new scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service that enables you to run your Cassandra workloads on AWS using the same Cassandra application code and developer tools that you use today. With this service, you don’t have to provision, patch, or manage servers, and you don’t have to install, maintain, or operate software. It is serverless, so you pay for only the resources you use and the service automatically scales tables up and down in response to application traffic. In this chalk talk, learn how you can get started with Amazon Managed Cassandra Service with just a few clicks in the console or a few lines of code.

DAT325 – Amazon DynamoDB: Under the hood of a hyperscale database
Come to this session to learn how Amazon DynamoDB was built as the hyperscale 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. This session discloses the underpinnings of DynamoDB and how we run a fully managed nonrelational database used by more than 100,000 customers. We cover the underlying technical aspects of how an application works with DynamoDB for authentication, metadata, storage nodes, streams, backup, and global replication.

DAT334-R – Advanced design patterns for Amazon DynamoDB
Join us for a practical hands-on workshop about using Amazon DynamoDB. This session is designed for developers, engineers, and database administrators who are involved in designing and maintaining DynamoDB applications. We begin with a walk-through of proven NoSQL design patterns for at-scale applications. Next, we use step-by-step instructions to apply lessons learned to design DynamoDB tables and indexes that are optimized for performance and cost. Expect to leave this session with the knowledge needed to build and monitor DynamoDB applications that can grow to any size and scale. (Note that this workshop is repeated once during the week.)

DAT335-R – Build serverless applications with Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda
Join us for this interactive, advanced-design, and best-practices workshop that demonstrates the breadth of AWS serverless offerings and how the components work together. We look at the evolution of an ecommerce company that starts with a low-effort serverless product catalog. The company then iterates to scale to a million daily users, and then it adds analytics and near-real-time monitoring. As we progress through the workshop, you participate in deep dives into AWS serverless services such as Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Kinesis. (Note that this workshop is repeated once during the week.)

DAT356 – How Intuit executed a stream producer and transformer with Amazon DynamoDB
Learn how the Intuit Data Platform team implemented a stream producer and transformer pattern that allows an application storing data in Amazon DynamoDB to publish events after applying a series of transformations to the stream. We discuss how this pattern allows Intuit to apply an ordered chain of transformations to a given data type and how it’s designed to have no data loss with an at-least-once delivery guarantee and self-healing capabilities. Furthermore, learn how this pattern can be extended to consume from any stream, inject custom transformations on a stream, and push events downstream for consumers to adopt.

DAT371 – Norton Storage Platform’s journey from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB
Symantec’s Norton Storage Platform offers online backup as a service to protect data from accidental deletion and malware. In this session, hear from Norton about the challenges it had managing Cassandra clusters at scale and why it migrated its metadata database from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB. Norton then dives into an innovative method it used to migrate its data using AWS Step Functions.

DAT373 – Data platform engineering: How Vanguard is migrating data to AWS
Organizations grappling with moving on-premises workloads and data to the cloud face the challenge of getting platform engineering and team structures right. In most cases, lift-and-shift migration is not an option. In this session, learn how Vanguard created a team to tackle volume and velocity of data for microservices and big data workloads, using data streaming (Amazon Kinesis), file transfer (AWS Storage Gateway), CDC replication (DB2 on z/OS, Oracle Exadata, Microsoft SQL Server), relational and NoSQL databases (Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora), and object storage (Amazon S3). The cloud data platform has seen a 200 percent YOY increase in adoption.

ENT308-S – Build your next microservices application with modern AWS services

Learn how easy it is to get started with a new application composed of several microservices on AWS Lambda, Amazon EKS, Amazon SQS, and Amazon DynamoDB. In this session, you first learn through live demonstration how to do basic administration, such as deploying an application and inspecting the relevant Kubernetes resources. Next, you learn some troubleshooting practices (using log files and accessing containers) and dive into advanced troubleshooting. Innovate faster with software as you learn to leverage some of the most modern services on AWS. This presentation is brought to you by New Relic, an APN Partner.

GAM302 – How CAPCOM builds fun games fast with containers, data, and machine learning
Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and Monster Hunter are just some of CAPCOM’s many globally successful game franchises. Join the CAPCOM team for the world premiere of a new mobile game in development that uses AWS managed database services and machine learning to speed the development process and innovate on their players’ behalf. In this session, Shinichi Inoue (VPoE), Jumpei Nakajima, and Kazuki Nakamura (senior engineers of system development) share details about how CAPCOM uses services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon DynamoDB.

GAM304 – Migrating the live Pokémon database to Aurora PostgreSQL
Learn how the Pokémon Company International stores and supports data for more than 300 million players with the help of AWS. In this session, Jeff Webb (development manager) and David Williams (senior DevOps engineer) discuss how they migrated to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon DynamoDB, resulting in zero downtime for operations. Hear about best practices for migration and get a glimpse into the services supporting Pokémon Go, including AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon Redshift.

SVS323-R – Mastering AWS Lambda streaming event sources

In this session, we dive into the details of consuming Amazon DynamoDB Streams and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with Lambda. We walk through common architecture patterns, and we discuss the different scaling options for DynamoDB and how they affect the stream. We then talk through Kinesis scaling and explain enhanced fan-out and when it is useful. We conclude by discussing reliability, management, monitoring, and what to do when something goes wrong.

SVS327-R – Build serverless APIs with the AWS CDK

In this session, we build a booking API using Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). We also test our functions locally with AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) and deploy them to AWS. Please bring your laptop.

SVS330-R – Build secure serverless mobile or web applications

In this session, you build a functional serverless web application powered by AWS Amplify, AWS AppSync, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB. Learn how to use Amplify to speed up development, take advantage of the GraphQL capabilities of AWS AppSync, and run your application logic with Lambda. You also learn how to add fully functional authentication capabilities to this application using Amplify and Amazon Cognito. Please bring your laptop.

SVS334-R – Build and monitor a secure serverless app powered by ASP.NET and AWS services

In this session, you use the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to build and deploy a serverless C# ASP.NET application that writes into an Amazon DynamoDB table. The application uses the web UI hosted by Amazon Cognito for OpenID authentication to process the JSON web token (JWT). Please bring your laptop.

SVS337-R – Best practices for building multi-region, active-active serverless applications

Customers are often looking at running their services at global scale, deploying applications to multiple regions. While it has traditionally been hard to do this—often requiring months of engineering work—serverless has changed the game! In this hands-on talk, we help you understand how to build different versions of a multi-region, active-active serverless backend. Learn the pros and cons of DNS routing versus IP Anycast, and see how you can leverage serverless services like Amazon Route 53, AWS Global Accelerator, Amazon API Gateway, Application Load Balancer, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB global tables to build global-scale, serverless applications.

Level 400—Expert

DAT403-R – Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns
This technical session is for advanced users of Amazon DynamoDB. The patterns and data models discussed in this session summarize a collection of implementations and best practices used by large customers—including Amazon retail businesses—to deliver highly scalable solutions for a wide variety of business problems. We delve into strategies for global secondary index sharding and index overloading, scalable graph processing with materialized queries, relational modeling with composite keys, executing transactional workflows on DynamoDB, and more.

About the Author

Craig Liebendorfer is a senior technical editor at Amazon Web Services.