DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) Now Generally Available

Earlier this year I told you about Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), a fully-managed caching service that sits in front of (logically speaking) your Amazon DynamoDB tables. DAX returns cached responses in microseconds, making it a great fit for eventually-consistent read-intensive workloads. DAX supports the DynamoDB API, and is seamless and easy to use. As a managed service, you simply create your DAX cluster and use it as the target for your existing reads and writes. You don’t have to worry about patching, cluster maintenance, replication, or fault management.

Now Generally Available
Today I am pleased to announce that DAX is now generally available. We have expanded DAX into additional AWS Regions and used the preview time to fine-tune performance and availability:

Now in Five Regions – DAX is now available in the US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Ireland), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and US West (N. California) Regions.

In Production – Our preview customers are reporting that they are using DAX in production, that they loved how easy it was to add DAX to their application, and have told us that their apps are now running 10x faster.

Getting Started with DAX
As I outlined in my earlier post, it is easy to use DAX to accelerate your existing DynamoDB applications. You simply create a DAX cluster in the desired region, update your application to reference the DAX SDK for Java (the calls are the same; this is a drop-in replacement), and configure the SDK to use the endpoint to your cluster. As a read-through/write-through cache, DAX seamlessly handles all of the DynamoDB read/write APIs.

We are working on SDK support for other languages, and I will share additional information as it becomes available.

DAX Pricing
You pay for each node in the cluster (see the DynamoDB Pricing page for more information) on a per-hour basis, with prices starting at $0.269 per hour in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. With DAX, each of the nodes in your cluster serves as a read target and as a failover target for high availability. The DAX SDK is cluster aware and will issue round-robin requests to all nodes in the cluster so that you get to make full use of the cluster’s cache resources.

Because DAX can easily handle sudden spikes in read traffic, you may be able to reduce the amount of provisioned throughput for your tables, resulting in an overall cost savings while still returning results in microseconds.

— Jeff;