Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)

Caching service purpose-built for DynamoDB compatibility

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available caching service built for Amazon DynamoDB. DAX delivers up to a 10 times performance improvement—from milliseconds to microseconds—even at millions of requests per second.

DAX does all the heavy lifting required to add in-memory acceleration to your DynamoDB tables, without requiring developers to manage cache invalidation, data population, or cluster management.

Now you can focus on building great applications for your customers without worrying about performance at scale. You do not need to modify application logic because DAX is compatible with existing DynamoDB API calls. Learn more in the DynamoDB Developer Guide.

You can enable DAX with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or by using the AWS SDK. Just as with DynamoDB, you only pay for the capacity you provision. Learn more about DAX pricing on the pricing page.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator introduced (1:12)

Benefits

Extreme performance

Though DynamoDB offers consistent single-digit-millisecond latency, DynamoDB + DAX takes performance to the next level with response times in microseconds for millions of requests per second for read-heavy workloads. With DAX, your applications remain fast and responsive, even when a popular event or news story drives unprecedented request volumes your way. No tuning required.

Highly scalable

With DynamoDB + DAX, you do not have to compromise on performance and scale. DAX lets you scale on demand. You can start with a three-node DAX cluster, and then add capacity by adding additional nodes. DAX lets you scale out to a 10-node cluster, giving you millions of requests per second.

Fully managed

Just like DynamoDB, DAX is fully managed. You no longer need to worry about management tasks such as hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a distributed cache cluster, or replicating data over multiple instances as you scale. DAX automates many common administrative tasks such as failure detection, failure recovery, and software patching.

Ease of use

DAX is tightly integrated with DynamoDB—you simply provision a DAX cluster, use the DAX client SDK to point your existing DynamoDB API calls at the DAX cluster, and let DAX handle the rest. Because DAX is API-compatible with DynamoDB, you don't have to make any functional application code changes. DAX does the heavy lifting behind the scenes to deliver improved performance. Furthermore, because the retrieval of cached data reduces the read load on existing DynamoDB tables, you also may be able to reduce their provisioned read capacity and lower overall operational costs.

Flexible

DAX enables you to provision one DAX cluster for multiple DynamoDB tables, multiple DAX clusters for a single DynamoDB table, or somewhere in between to give you maximal flexibility.

Secure

DAX fully integrates with AWS services to enhance security. You can use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) to assign unique security credentials to each user and control each user's access to services and resources. You also can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain systemwide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. Integration with AWS CloudTrail lets you easily log and audit changes to your cluster configuration. DAX supports Amazon VPC for secure and easy access from your existing applications. Tagging gives you additional visibility to help you manage your DAX clusters.

How it works

DAX is designed to run within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment. Amazon VPC defines a virtual network that closely resembles a traditional data center. With a VPC, you have control over its IP address range, subnets, routing tables, network gateways, and security settings. You can launch a DAX cluster in your virtual network and control access to the cluster by using Amazon VPC security groups.

The following diagram shows a high-level overview of DAX.

Get started

Learn more about DAX and create your first DAX cluster.

      Customers

      Tinder

      10 billion matches later, Tinder has changed the way people meet around the world. “For Tinder, performance is absolutely key. We are major users of DynamoDB. We love its simplicity and ability to scale with consistent performance,” said Maria Zhang, VP of Engineering at Tinder.

      “With DAX, AWS has taken performance to a new level, with response times in microseconds. We really like how DAX integrates seamlessly with DynamoDB, is API-compatible, and doesn’t require us to write any new code.”

      Canon

      Canon Inc. Office Imaging Products Development Planning & Management Center provides mission-critical cloud services connecting to business machines for worldwide customers across four continents.

      “Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a very wonderful service to improve the user experience of Amazon DynamoDB,” said Takashi Yagita, Principal Engineer, Office Imaging Products Development Planning & Management Center, Canon Inc. “Our developers like the excellent design concept of the DAX SDK, which enables us to switch from DynamoDB and start using DAX seamlessly. Our team has succeeded in keeping the DynamoDB capacity units far lower while improving the data access speed by DAX.”

      Careem

      Careem is a car-booking service and app that serves more than 40 cities and 11 countries in the broader Middle East. The company uses a number of AWS services, including DynamoDB, to store locations of its captains, promotions, and configurations. “We have been involved early on during the DAX public preview, and have been running our production workload on DAX with no issues,” said Tafseer-ul-Islam Siddiqui, Software Architect at Careem.

      “We are using DAX to scale our reads across our network of services. As a write-through cache, DAX has simplified our application stack and has removed the need for building a central service for our caching needs. A key feature that motivated our adoption of DAX was that it is API-compatible with DynamoDB and thus required minimal changes to use with our existing app—you only need to change the DynamoDB client to the DAX client. Our team was really impressed with the built-in failover and replication support.”


      Expedia

      Expedia Inc. is a leading online travel company, providing leisure and business travel to customers worldwide. "At Expedia, we are longtime customers of AWS, and use DynamoDB across the company to power many of our applications,” said Brandon O’Brien, Principal Software Engineer, Expedia, Inc.

      “We received early access to DAX, and it has proven to be fast and easy to use. DAX represents a big opportunity for us to find the optimal balance between infrastructure cost and system performance.”

      Twilio

      Twilio helps businesses make communications relevant and contextual by making it possible to easily embed real-time communication and authentication capabilities directly into software applications.

      “We depend on DynamoDB’s consistent performance and scalability and trust it to power our Programmable Chat offering,” said Pat Malatack, General Manager of Twilio Messaging. “The ability to supercharge DynamoDB with DAX is something we're looking forward to.”

      Genesys

      Genesys is the global leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions. “The AWS team has taken a best-practice architectural pattern and turned it into something repeatable and valuable for its customers. I expect DAX to become the de facto replacement for our distributed cache plus Amazon DynamoDB storage tier across our collections of microservices in PureCloud,” said Glenn Nethercutt, Chief Architect of PureCloud by Genesys.

      “The combination of sub-millisecond latency and simple transitions from the existing DynamoDB client means we'll be able to rapidly adopt this service as it becomes available across the globe, significantly improving our performance and cost profile for read-intensive workloads.”

      Additional Resources

      Integrating DAX into your .NET application (3:36)
      Deep dive on DAX with demo (43:31)
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