Amazon DynamoDB global tables provide you with a fully managed, multi-region, and mutli-master database. With global tables, you can replicate table data to multiple AWS Regions for higher availability and provide your applications local access to DynamoDB tables for fast read and write performance. In this chalk talk, we dive deep on keys to success when designing global tables. Learn how to manage throughput capacity for your global table correctly and get a deep understanding of how global tables replication works. We also walk through reference architectures and examples that you can take with you to help you build and optimize your own global applications.

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How Amazon Video Uses Amazon DynamoDB
Global Tables to Support Tens of Millions of
Global Viewers
Shahid Naveed
Software Development Manager
Amazon Prime Video
D A T 3 4 9
Matt Lewis
Software Development Manager
Amazon DynamoDB
Elliott Nash
Principal Technical Product Manager
Amazon Prime Video
Arturo Hinojosa
Sr. Technical Product Manager
Amazon DynamoDB

3. “We migrated billions of rows from
Oracle to Amazon DynamoDB,
increasing elasticity and reliability with
no downtime for our global customer
base.” Tim Kohn
VP of technology, Prime Video

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Prime Video Customer Ownership
Amazon’s streaming video service
Tens of millions of people watch movies and TV shows on Prime Video.
We were leveraging Oracle to support a service that empowered customers to purchase
content and download it for offline use.
Technical debt placing constraints on business growth
Workarounds to support business growth had increased operational overhead and introduced
points of failure, impacting the system’s availability.
DR solution involved a secondary standby Oracle cluster.
Migration
In 2018, we migrated from Oracle to DynamoDB to increase scale, performance, and resilience
while reducing costs and maintenance overhead.

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Disaster Recovery Requirements
User story
As a Prime Video customer, I require fast replication of ownership data to at least two AWS
Regions. Having data in multiple regions enables user requests to fail over to an alternate
region in the event of a regional outage.
Requirements
Replication must support insert/modify/delete actions.
Item modifications must replicate to other regions in under 10s.
Multi-master replication.
Graceful failover in event of region outage.

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Global Tables
Build high-performance, globally
distributed applications.
Low latency reads and writes
to locally available tables.
Multi-region redundancy
and resiliency.
Easy to set up, and no application
re-writes required.

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Global Tables for Disaster Recovery Use Cases
Global tables for disaster recovery
New system leverages global tables for cross-region replication to support failover scenarios.
Now, customers can still retrieve their ownership records if primary AWS Region is unavailable.
Consistency and conflict resolution
Able to read and write data in any region.
Data replicated between regions within a couple of seconds in most cases.
Eventual convergence with last-writer-wins conflict resolution.
Availability and durability
Improves the availability of DynamoDB data.
Provides a 99.999 SLA.
Available in 11 AWS Regions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

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Global Tables for Prime Video Customer Ownership
Results
Replication latency average 1,200 ms.
Migrated billions of rows of data to DynamoDB with zero downtime.
Achieved an average of 30 percent improvement in latency for KPIs critical to the video
playback experience.
Errors were reduced by 90 percent.
The project resulted in a single, globally replicated dataset with improved resiliency, scalability,
latency, operational efficiency, and a 55 percent reduction in cost compared with the old
system.

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Architecture
Ownership
requests
Load Balancer
Dynamic Config
Service
Ownership APIs
EC2 Hosts
Ownership APIs
EC2 Hosts
Availability Zone (1)
Availability Zone (n)
Dynamic Config
Service
US-East-1
Replica
US-West-1
Replica
US-West-2
Replica

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Q&A
1. How did we size and manage throughput capacity?
2. What are the metrics and logs that we monitor?
3. What worked really well with our design?
4. What would we have done differently?

12. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Elliott Nash
ellinash@amazon.com
Shahid Naveed
nshahid@amazon.co.uk
Arturo Hinojosa
ahino@amazon.com
Matt Lewis
matlw@amazon.com
Follow us on Twitter at
@DynamoDB

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