Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

DynamoDB: The “Big Easy” of NoSQL

Six out of the seven databases that we cover in this book are easy enough to run on your laptop. But running systems such as HBase, CouchDB, and others in production—and using them for applications handling massive workloads—is a much different matter. Even databases that are a famously easy to operate at smaller scale, such as Redis, present major challenges in production environments, usually requiring skilled (and expensive!) admins and operations specialists on hand.

DynamoDB is a different story—and an outlier in this book. You don’t have to install it, start it, or maintain it. You can sign up for an AWS account, create a DynamoDB table, and just go. As you’ll see, DynamoDB does require some operations-style ...