As I work with more and more clients the use cases for DynamoDB continue to rise. I wanted to put together a quick how to article.
Why DynamoDB?
Solid performance
Can scale
It is not a relational database
It is a fully managed DB that is replicated across 3 x AZs providing HA
Low cost
Integrated with IAM for authorization, admin, and security.
How to configure a DynamoDB

create

Here is where you want to give a name to the table and also provide a name for the primary partition key
You can uncheck the use default settings button for more customization

I’m switching to provisioned so it is free-tier eligible
These boxes are greyed out because auto scaling has been setup

AWS even builds in a nice calculator for calculating cost
My example: size of 8kb, 20 reads per second and want 40 writes per second

Here is where you can change the thresholds for scaling up and down

Create and now we are done

Give it a minute and now your DynamoDB is created

Items > create item

Insert some data then save

Everything looks good
Summary:
As you can see setting up a basic DynamoDB is very easy and simple if you already have a plan in place. As always, I hope y’all found this useful.