OK, first things first. I have to admit that I am, first and foremost, an old-school UNIX systems administrator. I’m that grizzled sysadmin in your shop who soliloquizes wistfully about managing UUCP for email “back in the day.” Centralizing Logs? Yeah, we had syslog, and saved it all off to compressed files.
Shipping complex applications at high velocity lead to increased failures. Longer pipelines, scattered microservices, and more code inherently lead to bigger complexity where small mistakes may cost you big time.
DynamoDB, the primary NoSQL database service offered by AWS, is a versatile tool. It’s fast, scales without much effort, and best of all, it’s billed on-demand! These things make DynamoDB the first choice when a datastore is needed for a new project. But as with all technology, it’s not all roses. You can feel a little lost if you’re coming from years of working with relational databases. You’re SQL and normalization know-how doesn’t bring you much gain.