Ashwin Bhat published this short article about their experience with a new pricing structure for DynamoDB called On-Demand Mode. With it, your capacity costs are strictly a function of how many capacity units you consume, rather than how many you would have provisioned in Provisioned Capacity Mode.
Amazon claims that DynamoDB will continue handling your traffic load without any provisioning on your part at all, removing the pain around capacity planning. This pricing structure seemed perfect for their use case: high performance when they need it, and no wasted money from over-provisioning.
On-demand mode is great for handling spiky user traffic, but it’s much more expensive per-query than a fully utilized provisioned capacity setup. When performing operations such as large backfills or data migrations, it may be cheaper to switch to provisioned mode with just the right estimated capacity that you’ll need for your operation. Good overview!
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