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AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Under the Hood: How We Built a Hyper-Scale Database (DAT321)

Amazon Web Services · 112K views · 2018-11-27 · 53:43

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Overview

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session on how DynamoDB was built as a hyper-scale NoSQL database. It discloses underpinnings of the service and how it is run for over 100,000 customers.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as an authoritative look at DynamoDB internals and as evidence it is a complex distributed system.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2022

Topics

Databases & storageDistributed systemsCloud, DevOps & reliability
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dynamodbawsnosqlreinvent

What people said

mjb · 2022-01 · Recommendation

We don't have a paper on DynamoDB's internals (yet?), but here's a talk you might find interesting from one of the folks who built and ran DDB for a long time: [VIDEO] And Doug Terry talking through the details of how DynamoDB's transaction protocol works: [LINK] If we did publish more about the internals of DDB, what would you be looking to learn? Architecture? Operational experience? Developer experience? There's a lot of material we could share, and it's useful to hear where people would like us to focus.

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appwiz · 2019-06 · Recommendation

Here are a couple videos from reInvent 2018: Jaso talking about DynamoDB internals [VIDEO] Marc talking about Lambda internals [LINK]

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talawahtech · 2019-01 · Reference

Saying DynamoDB is built on top of InnoDB is a pretty big oversimplification of a much more complex distributed system[1] and for all we know they could have switched out the low level the storage engine on the backend to something like RocksDB or WiredTiger. The Aurora storage subsystem is much more limited in terms of horizontal scalability and performance, they probably chose it because it was a better/quicker fit. 1. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Amazon Web Services, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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