Ex employee here who built an aws service. Dynamo is basically mandated. You need like VP approval to use a relational database because of some scaling stuff they ran into historically. That sucks because we really needed a relational database and had to bend over backwards to use dynamo and all the nonsense associated with not having sql. It was super low traffic too

Not "like using", they are mandated from the top to use DynamoDB for any storage. At my org in the retail page, you needed director approval if you wanted to use a relational DB for a production service.

Not sure why this is downvoted - this is absolutely correct.

A lot of AWS services under the hood depend on others, and especially us-east-1 is often used for things that require strong consistency like AWS console logins/etc (where you absolutely don't want a changed password or revoked session to remain valid in other regions because of eventual consistency).

> Dependencies like this should be made transparent

even internally, Amazon's dependency graph became visually+logically incomprehensible a long time ago