The DynamoDB paper - Marc's Blog
This week at USENIX ATC'22, a group of my colleagues1 from the AWS DynamoDB team are going to be presenting their paper Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service. This paper is a rare look at a real-world distributed system that runs at massive sca...
Hasnain says:
Just went ahead and read the paper, it’s a pretty accessible read. Some great insights from running and operating a system at scale.
“What's not to love about a 99.75% cache hit rate? The failure modes!
The downside is that caching introduces bimodal behavior. In the case of a cold start where request routers have empty caches, every DynamoDB request would result in a metadata lookup, and so the service had to scale to serve requests at the same rate as DynamoDB
So this metadata table needs to scale from handling 0.25% of requests, to handling 100% of requests. A 400x potential increase in traffic! Designing and maintaining something that can handle rare 400x increases in traffic is super hard.”
Posted on 2022-07-15T07:01:47+0000