What is Amazon DynamoDB? - Amazon DynamoDB
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What is Amazon DynamoDB?

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. DynamoDB lets you offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling a distributed database so that you don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling. DynamoDB also offers encryption at rest, which eliminates the operational burden and complexity involved in protecting sensitive data. For more information, see DynamoDB encryption at rest.

With DynamoDB, you can create database tables that can store and retrieve any amount of data and serve any level of request traffic. You can scale up or scale down your tables' throughput capacity without downtime or performance degradation. You can use the Amazon Web Services Management Console to monitor resource utilization and performance metrics.

DynamoDB provides on-demand backup capability. It allows you to create full backups of your tables for long-term retention and archival for regulatory compliance needs. For more information, see Using On-Demand backup and restore for DynamoDB.

You can create on-demand backups and enable point-in-time recovery for your Amazon DynamoDB tables. Point-in-time recovery helps protect your tables from accidental write or delete operations. With point-in-time recovery, you can restore a table to any point in time during the last 35 days. For more information, see Point-in-time recovery: How it works.

DynamoDB allows you to delete expired items from tables automatically to help you reduce storage usage and the cost of storing data that is no longer relevant. For more information, see Time to Live (TTL).

High availability and durability

DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for your tables over a sufficient number of servers to handle your throughput and storage requirements, while maintaining consistent and fast performance. All of your data is stored on solid-state disks (SSDs) and is automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones in an Amazon Region, providing built-in high availability and data durability. You can use global tables to keep DynamoDB tables in sync across Amazon Regions. For more information, see Global tables - multi-Region replication for DynamoDB.

Getting started with DynamoDB

We recommend that you begin by reading the following sections:

From there, you have two options to quickly get started with DynamoDB:

To learn more about application development, see the following:

To quickly find recommendations for maximizing performance and minimizing throughput costs, see the following: Best practices for designing and architecting with DynamoDB. To learn how to tag DynamoDB resources, see Adding tags and labels to resources.

For best practices, how-to guides, and tools, see Amazon DynamoDB resources.

You can use Amazon Database Migration Service (Amazon DMS) to migrate data from a relational database or MongoDB to a DynamoDB table. For more information, see the Amazon Database Migration Service User Guide.

To learn how to use MongoDB as a migration source, see Using MongoDB as a source for Amazon Database Migration Service. To learn how to use DynamoDB as a migration target, see Using an Amazon DynamoDB database as a target for Amazon Database Migration Service.

DynamoDB tutorials

The following tutorials present complete end-to-end procedures to familiarize yourself with DynamoDB. These tutorials can be completed with the free tier of Amazon and will give you practical experience using DynamoDB.