Analyzing the impact of peaks, DAX, global tables, and other cost multipliers
DynamoDB’s pricing heavily depends on how your application interacts with it. Shifts in request patterns can lead to cost spikes or throttling. You can try to avoid surprises by playing with the AWS DynamoDB cost calculator – but it often misses the nuances of real-world workloads. So we built an alternative.
Join us as we use this calculator to demystify how different workload characteristics and patterns really translate to DynamoDB cost impacts. Specifically, we’ll do a deep dive into how factors like traffic surges, multi-datacenter expansion, and the introduction of caching (e.g., DAX) impact DynamoDB costs. We’ll cover:
- How to more accurately predict costs for traffic peaks and uneven workloads
- How to assess the true cost of options like global tables and the derived costs of things like DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) or external caches
- How a few (anonymized) teams we work with ended up blindsided by their DynamoDB bills and the various options they considered for getting costs back under control
