DynamoDB Deep Dive for System Design Interviews
When Amazon needed a database that could handle Prime Day, they built DynamoDB. In 2023, DynamoDB processed over 89 million requests per second during peak traffic, powering the shopping carts, inventory checks, and order processing that make the world's largest shopping event possible.
DynamoDB achieves this scale through a fundamentally different approach than traditional databases.
Instead of optimizing for flexible queries, it optimizes for predictable performance at any scale. Instead of normalizing data, it requires you to design your schema around your access patterns. These trade-offs are not limitations to work around. They are the source of DynamoDB's power.
But this power comes with responsibility. Choose DynamoDB for the wrong workload, and you will fight the database instead of leveraging it. Model your data incorrectly, and you will hit hot partitions that throttle your entire application.
This chapter covers the practical DynamoDB knowledge that matters in system design interviews: data modeling, capacity planning, and patterns for solving common problems like hot partitions and transactions.