DynamoDB's history

Amazon's e-commerce platform had a huge set of decoupled services developed and managed individually, and each and every service had an API to be used and consumed by others. Earlier, each service had direct database access, which was a major bottleneck. In terms of scalability, Amazon's requirements were more than any third-party vendors could provide at that time.

DynamoDB was built to address Amazon's high availability, extreme scalability, and durability needs. Earlier, Amazon used to store its production data in relational databases and services had been provided for all required operations. However, they later realized that most of the services access data only through its primary key and they need not use complex queries to fetch the required data, plus maintaining these RDBMS systems required high-end hardware and skilled personnel. So, to overcome all such issues, Amazon's engineering team built a NoSQL database that addresses all the previously mentioned issues.

In 2007, Amazon released one research paper on Dynamo that combined the best of ideas from the database and key-value store worlds, which was inspiration for many open source projects at the time. Cassandra, Voldemort, and Riak were a few of them. You can find the this paper at http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf.

Even though Dynamo had great features that took care of all engineering needs, it was not widely accepted at that time in Amazon, as it was not a fully managed service. When Amazon released S3 and SimpleDB, engineering teams were quite excited to adopt these compared to Dynamo, as DynamoDB was a bit expensive at that time due to SSDs. So, finally after rounds of improvement, Amazon released Dynamo as a cloud-based service, and since then, it is one the most widely used NoSQL databases.

Before releasing to a public cloud in 2012, DynamoDB was the core storage service for Amazon's e-commerce platform, which started the shopping cart and session management service. Any downtime or degradation in performance had a major impact on Amazon's business, and any financial impact was strictly not acceptable, and DynamoDB proved itself to be the best choice in the end. Now, let's try to understand in more detail about DynamoDB.