Hacker News Reader

Comment by edu | Hacker News Reader

Question, how do you run your dev environment? Are you running in on AWS too and have a separate DynamoDB setup?

My production and staging/test environments are on AWS and I do development on my local linux box. Since DynamoDB is a web service I can connect to my DynamoDB tables from anywhere. If you have questions or need help feel free to contact me directly (or post here) and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have.

Nice, I didn't realize that ability to connect from anywhere. Have you found DynamoDB to be expensive in practice? Of course the cost is mitigated by the admin they handle.

Cost has not been an issue for me. I've got 14 tables on DynamoDB - most at 5 read, 5 write, and one at 20 read, 10 write - and its been costing me around $50-$60 per month. IMHO cheaper than running a MySQL database and a slave instances.

It was great during development because I would create the tables in the morning, code all day and then delete the tables at the end of the day so I would only pay for 6-8 hours of provisioned throughput!

Good report, thanks! I'll keep that idea in mind to delete tables to save $$.

There are 2 options which I use(d) when developing/deploying DynamoDB: - Have a separate (sub)account for dev/test/... in which you create your tables. Since one of the latest changes to their policy you are now able to configure the lowest read/write capacity possible: 1/1 - Join everything under one account but prefix your tables with dev_, test_, prod_*

I prefer the former as it enables me to have the dev/test env as similar as possible to the prod environment: same naming, and both env's are separated, when one gets compromised at least the other one doesn't suffer. Security rules are also easier as you don't have to create per-table rules, when you want to lock out some team-members from production tables, but not dev/test tables.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com