DynamoDB

Using CloudWatch and Lambda to implement ad-hoc scheduling

A while back I wrote about using DynamoDB TTL to implement ad-hoc scheduling. It generated some healthy debate and a few of you have mentioned alternatives including using Step Functions. So let’s take a look at some of these alternatives, starting with the simplest – using a cron job. We will assess this approach using the …

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Understanding the scaling behaviour of DynamoDB OnDemand tables

Update 15/03/2019: Thanks to Zac Charles who pointed me to this new page in the DynamoDB docs. It explains how the OnDemand capacity mode works. Turns out you DON’T need to pre-warm a table. You just need to create the table with the desired peak throughput (Provisioned), and then change it to OnDemand. After you change the table to OnDemand …

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DynamoDB TTL as an ad-hoc scheduling mechanism

CloudWatch Events let you easily create cron jobs with Lambda. However, it’s not designed for running lots of ad-hoc tasks, each to be executed once, at a specific time. The default limit on CloudWatch Events is a lowly 100 rules per region per account. It’s a soft limit, so it’s possible to request a limit …

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how to do fan-out and fan-in with AWS Lambda

In the last post, we look at how you can implement pub-sub with AWS Lambda. We compared several event sources you can use, SNS, Kinesis streams and DynamoDB streams, and the tradeoffs available to you. Let’s look at another messaging pattern today, push-pull, which is often referred to as fan-out/fan-in. It’s really two separate patterns …

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What is the best event source for doing pub-sub with AWS Lambda?

AWS offers a wealth of options for implementing messaging patterns such as pub-sub with Lambda, let’s compare and contrast some of these options. The pub-sub pattern Publish-Subscribe (often shortened to pub-sub) is a messaging pattern where publishers and subscribers are decoupled through an intermediary broker (ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ, SNS, etc.). SNS + Lambda In the AWS ecosystem, the obvious …

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The problems with DynamoDB Auto Scaling and how it might be improved

TL;DR – AWS announced the long awaited auto scaling capability for DynamoDB, but we found it takes too long to scale up and doesn’t scale up aggressively enough as it’s held back by using consumed capacity as scaling metric rather than actual request count. Here at Space Ape Games we developed an in-house tech to auto scale DynamoDB …

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aws x-ray and lambda : the good, the bad and the ugly

AWS announced general availability of AWS Lambda support for AWS X-Ray back in May. It’s taken me a while to try it out, and whilst I see plenty of values I think its current limitations significantly restricts its usefulness in a complex system. I found Lambda-specific documentations to be fragmented and I had to rely …

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Beware of dilution of DynamoDB throughput due to excessive scaling

update Jan 26, 2020: since this article was already written, the problem of throughput dilution has been resolved by DynamoDB’s adaptive capacity feature which is applied in real-time. TL;DR – The no. of partitions in a DynamoDB table goes up in response to increased load or storage size, but it never come back down, ever. DynamoDB …

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AWS Lambda – build yourself a URL shortener in 2 hours

An interesting requirement came up at work this week where we discussed potentially having to run our own URL Shortener because the Universal Links mechanism (in iOS 9 and above) requires a JSON manifest at https://domain.com/apple-app-site-association Since the OS doesn’t follow redirects this manifest has to be hosted on the URL shortener’s root domain. Owing to a limitation on AppsFlyer it’s …

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