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Ditch the DynamoDB to ScyllaDB Technical: Comparison and the Path to Success

How to cut your costs, latencies & cloud dependencies. Many teams are moving from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB to cut costs, latency, and AWS lock-in. Curious if a switch makes sense for your specific use case… and what a migration would really involve? Join Guilherme Nogueira, ScyllaDB Technical Director, for a 25-minute session based on what we've learned working with your peers across hundreds of real migrations. Join us to: - Compare the databases: what's the same, what's similar, and what's genuinely different - Know your migration path: when to use the DynamoDB-compatible API vs. shift to CQL, and the tradeoffs, tools, and tips for each approach - Learn from what's worked: practical do's and don'ts drawn from hundreds of DynamoDB to ScyllaDB migrations

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DynamoDB to ScyllaDB Technical Comparison and the Path to Success Ditch the DynamoDB Tax Guilherme Nogueira
Guilherme Nogueira 2 + A.K.A. Gui + Technical Director + Previously Solutions Architect at ScyllaDB + Helping DB users at scale
Question: What is the biggest challenge you currently face with your DynamoDB workloads? ● Unpredictable or spiraling costs at scale ● Performance bottlenecks ● Vendor lock-in ● None of the above – it runs perfectly 3 Poll time
+ Key reasons users ditch DynamoDB + ScyllaDB for DynamoDB workloads + Migration Overview + Migration Stories + Cost + Takeaways Presentation Agenda 4
Key reasons users ditch DynamoDB 5
Bill shock + Scales with workload + But more often than not, surprises users + In most of the cases + 2x payload = 2x cost + Simple, right? + Writes costs 5x more than reads + Cost multipliers: + Indexes, Global Tables, DAX… Provisioned On-Demand 6
Cost Modes + Complex to continuously get right 󰷺 + Start small, on-demand + Workload scales == $$ + No way to mix and match 7
Performance + Single-digit ms read p99 relies on DAX + DAX == $$ + Autoscaling is slow + Throttling + Capacity modes are rigid + On-demand scales well, costs a lot + Item limits + 400Kb per item 8
Vendor lock-in + AWS ecosystem seamless integration + Harder to leave + Cloud Agnosticity + Insecure (at worst) + Requires specialized networking (at best) + Slower + Expensive + Serve customers locally on other Clouds / regions / on-premises 9
Question: If you had total freedom, where would you ideally want to run your high-throughput NoSQL database? ● Fully managed DBaaS on my preferred cloud provider ● A multi-cloud environment (distributing risk across AWS, GCP, Azure). ● On-premises or on my own bare-metal servers ● Kubernetes, wherever my clusters happen to live 10 Poll time
ScyllaDB for DynamoDB workloads 11
Efficiency Shard-per-core Workload Prioritization Built-in cache Capacity-based Pricing Throttling-free Scaling Cloud agnostic 12
ScyllaDB's DynamoDB-compatible API + Native DynamoDB API + Same efficiency + Works as-is + No changes to table or queries 13 + Run anywhere + Any cloud, VM, k8s, bare metal + Tables, Indexes, Streams + Types, drivers
Migration Overview 14
High level migration Using Scylla Migrator (Spark-based, open source) + Config (point to a table and Alternator cluster) + Alternatively, DDB backup S3 bucket + Start Migrator + Enables Streams + Migrates data + Scans + S3 reads + Replay Streams + Switch application over to Alternator + Done! 15
Streaming Migration Source https://www.scylladb.com/2020/09/02/one-step-streaming-migration-from-dynamodb-into-scylla/ 16
Migration Stories 17
+ Ad-tech company + Billions ad auctions/day + Ad delivery SLA 200-300ms + DB <10ms + 3TB table (28 billion objects) + Pains: + Unsustainable scaling costs + Deploy to other Cloud Providers + Cloud lock-in + With ScyllaDB + POC'd and migrated to Alternator + 50% cost reduction + Enabled Multi-Cloud 18 Yieldmo cut costs staying on AWS
Digital Turbine’s path to GCP Digital Turbine migrated from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB Alternator on GCP + Full POC (+ app failover) until team was comfortable + Ease of migration + No application refactor + Reduce cost (20% cost reduction upfront, with opportunity for more) + Better performance + ScyllaDB Alternator cluster, ~2,000 ops/sec (90% reads , 10% Writes) + Leveraging DynamoDB API + DynamoDB ~1,400 ops/sec (90% reads , 10% Writes) + Observed light throttling on the DynamoDB side + 6 regions, 3 environments 19
+ Use-cases: + Continue watching + Pings every 30s + Write-heavy + Watch status + Pains: + Read latency vs cost + Write throughput + Database must replicate traffic Streaming Service migration + Challenges: + No service disruption + Cloud-native + Highly-available + Global replication on a single cluster + Migration to ScyllaDB: + CQL for more flexibility + Single cluster + 5 Regions (USA/EU) https://www.scylladb.com/tech-talk/why-we-chose-scylladb-over-dynamodb-for-user-watch-status/ 20
EV Manufacturer, path to on-premises + Self-driving vehicles + North America-based + Company-wide mandate to drop AWS + Huge DynamoDB usage + Multiple Petabytes + Write-heavy + Large payload + Read-Modify-Write + Increasing over time + Plans to scale massively + ScyllaDB Enterprise + On-premises, own data centers + Long period of Cloud/on-prem + Massive nodes + 256 vCPUs + 2TB RAM + 160TB + Super fast local networking + Tradeoffs: CQL or Alternator? + Needed to save on network + Free networking between racks on-prem 21
North-American Streaming Service + Old company, newer service + On AWS, but planning move to OCI + Single-digit ms on DynamoDB is expensive + DAX on a large dataset + Random access pattern + Challenges with 3 use-cases + Click Management + Ad Bidding + Identity Management System + Feature Store + Tradeoff: self-managed or ScyllaDB Cloud? + Performance goal achieved + 2ms P99 reads + No streaming pipeline backlog + Multi-Cloud path unlocked + AWS -> current + OCI -> future + Cost slashed by more than 50% 22
ZEE, largest India media conglomerate + ~150M monthly active users across 190+ countries + +100 billion heartbeats per day + Track user playback + "Continue Watching" + Title viewership metrics + Original design: DynamoDB, RDS, Solr, Redis + ScyllaDB = combined cache + persistence in one layer, cloud neutrality, multi-cloud readiness, and sub-millisecond latency guarantees. + 5X cost reduction + Single-digit ms latency https://www.scylladb.com/tech-talk/tracking-millions-of-heartbeats-on-zees-ott-platform/ 23
Speaking of cost… 24
Workload Cost Calculator https://calculator.scylladb.com 25
Question: If you were to migrate your DynamoDB workload to ScyllaDB tomorrow, what would be your primary driving factor? ● Slashing our monthly infrastructure bill by at least 50% ● Guaranteeing predictable, single-digit millisecond latency at millions of ops/sec ● Gaining the flexibility to migrate off AWS if our business needs change ● Honestly, I'd need to see a proof of concept first 26 Poll time
Takeaways 27
Takeaways + Key reasons for migrating off: + Cost + Performance + Lock-in + Users feel locked by their DB + ScyllaDB solves all 3 + And adds much more features 28
Guilherme Nogueira guilherme.nogueira@scylladb.com @hopugop Stay in Touch 29
Thank you for joining us today. @scylladb scylladb/ slack.scylladb.com @scylladb company/scylladb/ scylladb/
Real-time AI search engine + Search Cache within AI platform + 14KB average item size + Challenges: + Cost + Performance + >400KB items + ScyllaDB Cloud + 50-200 items/batch @ 14KB each + 10ms per read batch + 80K reads/s + Lessons learned: + Future proof infra + Scale payload + Without scaling cost 31 TODO Replace with a non-churn :lolsob