Author: Kapil Raina

The first article on the insights from Data Migrations using AWS DMS focused on on-prem Oracle source to AWS RDS PostgreSQL target. In this article, we look at the AWS DynamoDB as the target for the on-prem Oracle 19 database. The examples presented in this article are modeled on practical migration challenges for clients where this migration path was followed. 

The challenges in the migration to DynamoDB are closely related to the inherent DynamoDB design and how radically it differs from RDBMs like Oracle. The laser-sharp focus that AWS has on scaling DynamoDB at any volume to provide consistent throughput means certain restrictions in how the model works. And so, the schema-less-ness of DynamoDB makes migration from RDBMS a unique challenge. 

This article is a part of a series that looks at serverless from diverse points of view and provides pragmatic guides that help in adopting serverless architecture, tackling practical challenges in serverless, and discussing how serverless enables reactive event-driven architectures. The articles stay clear of a Cloud provider serverless services, only referring to those in examples (AWS being a common reference).  

As discussed in the article, "Serverless Reference Architecture," serverless finds its footprint in diverse workload patterns. Web is the most common and ubiquitous application type, allowing the delivery of content and business journeys over the internet. This article details 5 patterns of serverless web architecture, with details on the motivation and impacts of using the pattern. The designs are presented in a cloud/vendor-neutral way with a supplementary AWS implementation. Given the range of services across all major cloud providers, the same pattern can be implemented across all. Finally, the details include a few potential pitfalls and best practices.

This article is a part of a series that looks at serverless from diverse points of view and provides pragmatic guides that help in adopting serverless architecture, tackling practical challenges in serverless, and discussing how serverless enables reactive event-driven architectures. The articles stay clear of a Cloud provider serverless services, only referring to those in examples (AWS being a common reference). The articles in this series are published periodically and can be searched with the tag “openupserverless.”

Brief Background

To recap on the broad-based meaning of serverless, serverless is any offering that abstracts out the infrastructure choices and provisioning from DevOps and works on a usage-based cost model. The usage is defined in the context of the service by the platform vendors.