Amazon DynamoDB

Companies in the advertising technology (ad tech) vertical use DynamoDB as a key-value store for storing various kinds of marketing data, such as user profiles, user events, clicks, and visited links. Applicable use cases include real-time bidding (RTB), ad targeting, and attribution. These use cases require a high request rate (millions of requests per second), low predictable latency, and reliability. Companies use caching through DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) when they have high read volumes or need submillisecond read latency. Increasingly, ad tech companies need to deploy their RTB and ad targeting platforms in more than one geographical AWS Region, which requires data replication between Regions.

Companies in the gaming vertical use DynamoDB in all capabilities of game platforms, including game state, player data, session history, and leaderboards. The main benefits that these companies get from DynamoDB are its ability to scale reliably to millions of concurrent users and requests while ensuring consistently low latency measured in single-digit milliseconds. In addition, as a fully managed service, DynamoDB has no operational overhead, so game developers can focus on developing their games instead of managing databases. Also, as game developers are increasingly looking to expand from a single AWS Region to multiple AWS Regions, they can rely on DynamoDB global tables for multiple-Region, active-active replication of data.

Many companies in the retail space use common DynamoDB design patterns to deliver consistently low latency for mission-critical use cases. Being free from scaling concerns and operational burden is a key competitive advantage and an enabler for high-velocity, extreme-scaled events such as Amazon Prime Day, whose magnitudes are difficult to forecast. Scaling up and down allows these customers to pay only for the capacity they need and keeps precious technical resources focused on innovations rather than operations.

As companies in banking and finance build more cloud-native applications, they seek to use fully managed services to increase agility, reduce time to market, and minimize operational overhead. At the same time, they have to ensure the security, reliability, and high availability of their applications. As these companies expand their existing services that are backed by legacy mainframe systems, they find that legacy systems are unable to meet the scalability demands of their growing user base, new platforms such as mobile applications, and the resulting increases in traffic. To solve this problem, they replicate data from their mainframes to the cloud to offload the traffic.

Media and entertainment companies use DynamoDB when they require an extreme scale of throughput and concurrency, low latency, and reliability. DynamoDB scales elastically to handle the load and maintains low latency that is critical for real-time scenarios, such as video streaming and interactive content. In such scenarios, the number of concurrent users can reach millions, and no database handles that kind of concurrency as well as DynamoDB. Despite such high concurrency, the latency remains low, affording individual users optimal user experience, whether it involves retrieving their media, or participating in an interactive, real-time event. These companies use DynamoDB to address their scalability challenges and to keep their focus on feature development and not on database management.

One key commonality among software companies and many other DynamoDB customers is internet scale. These companies’ use cases require the ability to accommodate extreme concurrency, request rates, and spikes in traffic. This concurrency is measured in millions of users and connections, and request rates can easily reach millions per second. DynamoDB has a proven record of being able to handle internet-scale use cases and their requirements while maintaining consistent, single-digit millisecond latency. With global tables, DynamoDB customers can easily expand their applications to multiple AWS Regions for global reach and business continuity.