DynamoDB and It’s Partition Strategy For Read Heavy Use-case

When you run your application in AWS Cloud and you choose NOSQL database, high chance you will end up using DynamoDB as your NOSQL database.

AWS has called out all the best practice of DynamoDB partition designs.

Best practices for designing and using partition keys effectively

Let’s say even after following this best practices you are still getting hot partition on read and/or write use case for partition that you are using, or you are not in position to apply more cardinality in your partition keys, what are my path forward. This page is talking about patterns that you can apply to solve that challenge.

What are potential use-case that can get you in to hot partitions?

1. Typically when you use DynamoDB as domain cache layer and your use case is read heavy, you will get in to this challenge.
2. You do not have proper cardinality available in your partition keys.
3. Even you went live and now amount of keys that you ended up creating as real data came to your system, you might get in to this challenge of hot key due to amount of reads you have. Your access patterns can also create hot keys.

Challenge We faced