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Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a serverless key-value and document database designed for consistent single-digit millisecond performance at virtually any scale.

Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon DynamoDB.

Amazon DynamoDB pricing and cost programs

Pricing model: Serverless table usage

On-Demand
Available
Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
Service-specific
Savings Plans
Available
Spot
Not applicable

Billing dimensions: Read and write capacity · Storage and table class · Backups · Streams and exports

Programs and modes: On-Demand capacity · Provisioned capacity · Reserved capacity · Database Savings Plans

DynamoDB uses reserved capacity rather than database instances; eligibility and terms are listed on the pricing page.

Free Tier: Available — verify current offers

Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.

Official AWS pricing

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.

Why implement Amazon DynamoDB?

  • Automatically distributes data and traffic without database hosts, storage provisioning, patching, or replica management.
  • Supports on-demand and provisioned capacity, global tables, transactions, change streams, backups, time-to-live, and event-driven integrations.
  • Offers predictable low-latency key access for internet-scale applications when keys and indexes match known access patterns.

How to implement Amazon DynamoDB

  1. Enumerate required reads and writes with keys, ordering, filters, consistency, item sizes, and expected traffic, then design the primary key and only necessary secondary indexes.
  2. Create the table with on-demand or provisioned capacity, encryption, point-in-time recovery, deletion protection, tags, streams, TTL, and global replication where required.
  3. Use an AWS SDK with least-privilege roles, conditional writes, pagination, controlled concurrency, idempotency, retries with jitter, and CloudWatch alarms for the chosen capacity mode.

Amazon DynamoDB best practices

  • Choose high-cardinality partition keys that spread traffic, keep items and partitions bounded, and use write sharding or caching only when measurements show a hot-key problem.
  • Prefer key conditions over scans, project only required attributes, use batch APIs deliberately, and use transactions or conditional expressions when correctness requires them.
  • Enable point-in-time recovery for important tables, test restore and regional recovery, secure access with IAM and encryption, and monitor throttling, errors, latency, capacity, and account quotas.

Amazon DynamoDB use cases and server impact

  • Shopping carts, sessions, and user profiles
  • High-scale event metadata and state
  • Globally distributed key-value applications

Replaces partitioned NoSQL clusters and their patching, replication, and scaling operations, but the application must embrace DynamoDB access patterns and bounded item semantics.

Official implementation resources

How Amazon DynamoDB works with other AWS services

Arrows show the documented technical direction. Reciprocal navigation does not imply a reverse technical dependency.

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-25.

AWS Lambda → Amazon DynamoDB

AWS Lambda reads and writes Amazon DynamoDB

Lambda functions call DynamoDB APIs with the function execution role; DynamoDB Streams can separately feed table changes back to Lambda through an event source mapping.

Why teams use it
The pairing provides serverless compute and low-operations key-value persistence that scale independently.
Permissions and networking
Use least-privilege table and index permissions, design partition keys for traffic, handle retries idempotently, and encrypt sensitive attributes appropriately.
Pricing and security caveats
DynamoDB capacity, storage, streams, and Lambda execution are separately billed. A direct write and a stream-triggered invocation are two distinct directions.

AWS Backup → Amazon DynamoDB

AWS Backup protects recovery points for Amazon DynamoDB

AWS Backup can schedule, retain, copy, and restore DynamoDB table backups under centralized backup plans.

Why teams use it
The pairing applies shared governance and restore controls across serverless tables and other supported resources.
Permissions and networking
Enable the required DynamoDB backup features, scope service roles, protect vaults, and test restoring tables plus dependent application configuration.
Pricing and security caveats
Backup storage and copies are separately billed; restores create new resources and do not automatically reconnect every application dependency.

Architecture patterns using this service

  • Build a secure serverless API on AWS — Authenticate users with Amazon Cognito, validate requests at Amazon API Gateway, run business logic in AWS Lambda, and store application data in Amazon DynamoDB.
  • Run queue-backed asynchronous workers on AWS — Buffer background work in Amazon SQS, process it with Lambda or ECS workers under a concurrency ceiling, keep state in DynamoDB, and use dead-letter queues, redrive, and CloudWatch alarms to keep the system honest.

Planning guides that use Amazon DynamoDB