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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

DynamoDB is amazing for the right applications if you very carefully understand its limitations.

Last year I built out a recommendation engine for my company; it worked well, but we wanted to make it real-time (a user would get recommendations from actions they made seconds ago, instead of hours or days ago). I planned a 4-6 week project to implement this and put it into production. Long story short: I learned about DynamoDB and built it out in a day of dev time (start to finish, including learning the ins and outs of DynamoDB). The whole project was in stable production within a week. There has been zero down time, the app has seamlessly scaled up ~10x with consistently low latency, and it all costs virtually (relatively) nothing.

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This is the good side of Dynamo, and it's awesome that you've had that experience.

The flip side: Dynamo gets expensive and it gets expensive quick, and being a custom API (and, indeed, a very different way to think about datastores) makes migration difficult.

It's great to use, if you understand the tradeoffs. Just make sure you understand them before you make the leap.

>Dynamo gets expensive and it gets expensive quick,

DynamoDB's pricing scales sublinearly with volume; if it starts getting expensive it was an initial misuse of DynamoDB that got obvious with scale. There are a lot of factors that go into whether you should use DynamoDB and how you implement it. I recommend anyone who is considering using it very carefully understand this page first: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developergu...

This is how enterprise developers use the database, sometimes:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Query-of-Despair

You do this on your own server, slowness and bad performance are the result (but it may never, or very rarely get called). You do it on dynamo, a $10k bill may be the result.

That's not quite true. With DynamoDB, you provision capacity, so by default, it will simply get slow (throttled) if you use more than you expect.

The only way you could be "surprised" with a $10k bill is if you set up autoscaling for it with your upper limits (which it requires you to choose) high enough to reach $10k. And then you'd have to forget that you did that.

Formatting is obviously an issue but the query length isn't a sign for bad programming. I've created some queries that probably have nearly that length. They filter, join and prepare data in ways that would probably need as much LOC in other languages while running much faster (as the database server can better optimise for structures). In this case there obviously was a problem but it could've been that someone changed an index in one table which then affected the query.

But I agree, I also don't like running databases billed by load. The risk of costly bugs is just too high.

On the flip side tho, Dynamo can be cheap for small apps. The cost to provision an RDS instance with backup can easily be 10x to 20x what the same load would take on Dynamo.

Of course as you scale this an be less true, so it's all in the application.

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