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Last time, we got a general overview of DynamoDB. This time, let's look at some advanced features.
All the features described so far are core DynamoDB features. But DynamoDB also has some additional, more advanced features that you can use to build complex applications. In this section, I’ll provide a short list of what these features are and what you can use them for.
Selecting a proper technology for a new project is always a stressful event. We need to find something that will fit all existing requirements, does not restrict further growth, allows us to achieve necessary performance, does not put a heavy operational burden, etc. It’s only natural that selecting a database can be tricky.
In this article, I would like to describe the DynamoDB database created by AWS. My goal is to give you enough knowledge so you would be able to answer a simple question: “Should I use DynamoDB in my next project?” I will describe in what cases DynamoDB can be used efficiently and what pitfalls to avoid. I hope this will help you to make your life easier.
One of my favorite features that was announced during re:Invent 2018 was DynamoDB On-Demand. With DynamoDB On-Demand, we can use DynamoDB without provisioning capacity. Instead, we pay per request. Sounds amazing, huh? I was excited and re-configured all DynamoDB tables of our SaaS product marbot: cloud-native alerting for CloudWatch via Slack. The result is stunning but misleading.
I shared my excitement on Twitter, and today, I add what we learned in the following weeks.
No other language manifests Edsger Djikstra's notion of brevity without jargon better than GraphQL. This is a querying language that has proven its worth by its simplicity and effortlessness in an application of what would otherwise be heavy and ugly in the domain of API calls and database querying. As I was exploring the capabilities of this querying language, I was quick to realize its potential in its main use as an API building tool. I also realized that its benefits are greatly underrated, and thus made it my aim with this piece to stress on the advantages of GraphQL as well as introduce its importance in the realm of serverless which is greatly aided by AWS AppSync.
AWS AppSync itself is a powerful application development service that allows you to create services using GraphQL. It truly does justice to the abilities of GraphQL and after personally using it to build a simple API, I can not imagine developing API’s with a serverless framework in any other way. Released in 2017, AppSync has several features that ease the use of GraphQL and again, I strongly feel that the value of these features is greatly underrated or simply not known due to the novelty of the service.