DynoTable

Operations & Cost

Modeling gets your data in. Operating it — keeping writes consistent, reacting to changes, expiring old rows, paying the right capacity bill, surviving a region outage, and recovering from a bad deploy — is the half that decides whether a DynamoDB table is something you trust in production.

This section is one running scenario, not six disconnected reference pages. You are building the audit log for a multi-tenant SaaS — the immutable record of "who did what, when" that every B2B product eventually has to ship for its enterprise customers. One table, partitioned per tenant:

PKSKactoractionip
TENANT#acmeEVENT#2026-06-24T09:14Z#a1USER#88login.success203.0.113.7
TENANT#acmeEVENT#2026-06-24T09:15Z#a2USER#88invoice.export203.0.113.7
TENANT#globexEVENT#2026-06-24T09:15Z#b9USER#12role.granted198.51.100.4

Every guide below adds one operational concern to this same table:

0 of 11 readQuiz
DynamoDB Cost Model: Why SQL Can Hide the Bill
Why SQL over DynamoDB can hide the bill — how joins, arbitrary WHERE filters and aggregates compile to Scans, and the RCU math behind Query vs Scan.
Intermediate4 min read
DynamoDB Transactions
DynamoDB transactions with TransactWriteItems — up to 100 all-or-nothing actions, a 4 MB limit, double write capacity, and how conflicts cancel.
Advanced6 min read
DynamoDB Streams
DynamoDB Streams — the 24-hour change-data-capture log, the four StreamViewType options, per-item ordered records, and triggering Lambda on item changes.
Advanced6 min read
DynamoDB TTL
DynamoDB TTL auto-deletes items once a Unix-epoch timestamp attribute passes, typically within a few days, and those deletes cost no write capacity.
Intermediate4 min read
DynamoDB On-Demand vs Provisioned Capacity
DynamoDB On-Demand vs Provisioned capacity — pay-per-request against reserved throughput, when each is cheaper, and how traffic shape picks the mode.
Intermediate6 min read
How to Set Up DynamoDB Auto Scaling
Set up DynamoDB auto scaling on provisioned capacity — console and CLI steps, picking target utilization and min/max, and the limits that still throttle.
Intermediate8 min read
DynamoDB Throttling and How to Fix It
Why DynamoDB throttles — the four documented causes, per-partition limits of 3,000 read and 1,000 write units per second, and the fix for each.
Intermediate8 min read
DynamoDB Table Size and Item Count
Get a DynamoDB table size and item count from the free DescribeTable estimate, which lags up to six hours, or an exact count with Scan Select COUNT.
Beginner5 min read
DynamoDB Global Tables
DynamoDB Global Tables — multi-region active-active replication, last-writer-wins conflicts, the MREC and MRSC consistency modes, and the 99.999% SLA.
Advanced6 min read
DynamoDB Backup & Point-in-Time Recovery
DynamoDB backup and point-in-time recovery — on-demand snapshots vs continuous PITR, the 1-to-35-day window, and the settings a restore doesn't bring back.
Intermediate7 min read
Knowledge checkTake the quiz
Check what you’ve learned in this section.

Read them in order — each assumes the table from the one before. Start with transactions; the rest build on the events it writes.

Download DynoTable to inspect, query, and edit the audit-log table as you work through the scenario. For the cost side, the free pricing calculator prices a workload in either capacity mode, and the TTL converter turns dates into the epoch values TTL expects.