The document presents a technical comparison between DynamoDB and ScyllaDB, highlighting ScyllaDB's advantages in performance, cost, and scalability. It discusses migration pathways, case studies, and best practices for transitioning from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB, emphasizing minimal changes to applications. The conclusion suggests that migrating to ScyllaDB can provide significant benefits and encourages exploring available resources for successful implementation.

1. DynamoDB
to ScyllaDB
A technical comparison
and path to success
Tim Koopmans, Product Experience
Guilherme Nogueira, Technical Director

2. Presentation Agenda
+ Introduction
+ Understanding ScyllaDB
+ Comparing DynamoDB and ScyllaDB
+ Migration Options and Tools
+ Case Studies and Best Practices
+ Conclusion

3. About ScyllaDB

4. Why ScyllaDB?
On-Prem
Cloud Hosted
Scylla Cloud
Best High Availability in the industry
Best Disaster Recovery in the industry
Best scalability in the industry
Best Performance in the industry
Auto-tune - out of the box performance
Fully compatible with Cassandra & DynamoDB
Best Elasticity in the industry
Best Price/Performance in the industry

5. Tablets
Schedulers
Shard per Core
Tiered Storage
Built in caching, Load balancing
What sets us apart?

6. Why do DynamoDB customers switch?

7. + Adequate provisioned capacity but high throttling
+ Throttling despite activated AWS Application Auto Scaling
+ Throttling in on-demand capacity mode
+ Presence of a hot partition
+ Traffic exceeding account throughput quotas
ProvisionedThroughputExceededException

8. Comparing DynamoDB
and ScyllaDB

9. The benchmark
Provisioned Throughput
200K RCU
250K WCU
Cluster Size
i4i.2XL x 3
YCSB Loaders
c5.2XL x 8
18-150K ops/sec
lp.scylladb.com/price-performance-dynamoDB-benchmark-offer

10. Latency

11. Latency

12. Throughput

13. Throughput
+ DynamoDB
+ Throughput limited
at partition level
+ ScyllaDB
+ Balanced / prioritized workloads across the
entire cluster

14. Cost
DynamoDB ScyllaDB
Provisioned cost $30k/mo $4.5k/mo
On-demand cost $206k/mo* $4.5k/mo
P99 latency 20.2 ms 11.1 ms

15. Migrating from
DynamoDB to
ScyllaDB

16. + ScyllaDB is closely related to DynamoDB
Similarities
Dynamo Paper
(Amazon)
BigTable Paper
(Google)
2006 2007 2008 2015
2012

17. + ScyllaDB implements CQL
+ Query language
+ Protocol
+ Data model
+ Alternator brought in DynamoDB API compatibility
+ Not a translation layer!
+ Popular standards as transport
+ HTTP/S and JSON
What ScyllaDB brings to the table

18. Comparison
Aspect CQL DynamoDB API
Transport CQL binary protocol HTTP/S and JSON
Protocol Cluster-aware Single endpoint
Query language Prepared statements No prepared statements
Write model
Conflict-free Replicated Data
Types (CRDT) / Lightweight
Transactions (LWT)
Read-Modify-Write

19. Comparison - Schema
+ CQL enforces a schema
+ Partition Key(s), Clustering Key(s)
+ CQL types
+ UDTs
+ Materialized Views, Local Secondary Indexes, Global Secondary Indexes
+ CDC
+ DynamoDB enforces Keys
+ Primary Key, Sorting Key
+ DynamoDB Types
+ Local Secondary Indexes, Global Secondary Indexes
+ DynamoDB Streams

20. Depending on the chosen path
+ DynamoDB to ScyllaDB Alternator
+ No application rewrite
+ Table should work as-is
+ Run DDB-compatible workloads anywhere!
+ DynamoDB to CQL
+ Application and Table changes required
+ Feature-rich, cluster aware
+ High performance
Migration Paths

21. + DynamoDB to ScyllaDB Alternator
+ Use DynamoDB-API compatible libraries and tools
+ Dual writes
+ Change application to target both DDB and Alternator
+ Leverage DynamoDB Streams + Lambda
+ Historical data lift-and-shift
+ Read from DDB table
+ Consumes RCUs
+ Beware of throttling and $
+ Export to S3
Migration Paths - DDB to Alternator

22. + DynamoDB to ScyllaDB using CQL
+ Use DynamoDB-API compatible tools
+ Python boto3 and Java AWS SDK
+ Native CQL libraries for interacting with ScyllaDB
+ Dual writes
+ Change application to target both DDB and ScyllaDB
+ Historical data lift-and-shift
+ ETL from DDB types to CQL types
+ Read from table or S3
Migration Paths - DynamoDB to CQL

23. Libraries designed to work with DynamoDB API works with Alternator
+ Python boto3, Java AWS SDK…
+ Kafka Streams Connector
+ NoSQL Workbench
+ Spark
Tooling - Alternator

24. Tooling - CQL
+ Built-in shard awareness on ScyllaDB drivers
+ Enabled by default
+ Supports many languages:
+ Leveraged by connectors:
+ Rack awareness (save on Cloud networking)

25. + Reading tables can trip throttling
+ Impact to Production apps
+ Reading JSON from S3 has its challenges
+ Not everything abides to JSON standards
+ Better to stick with official libraries to import data
+ Schema changes over the years
Challenges

26. Case Studies And Best
Practices

27. + Cost
+ Limited SDK
+ Write throughput
+ Why ScyllaDB?
+ Multi-region
+ ICS, CDC, Seastar shared-nothing, drivers
+ 1ms writes, single-digit read p99
Why did Disney Streaming move out of
DynamoDB?

28. Real World Examples
Digital Turbine migrated from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB Alternator on GCP
+ Ease of migration
+ No application refactor
+ Reduce cost (20% cost reduction upfront, with opportunity for more)
+ Better performance
+ ScyllaDB Alternator cluster, 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

29. Real World Examples
Yieldmo migrated from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB Alternator on AWS
+ Billions of ad auctions per day – in milliseconds
+ No room for error
+ No code changes required
+ Improve latencies
+ Reduce cost

30. + Keep vital metrics close
+ Use Scylla Monitoring stack
+ Know your data and your application
+ Learn about historical changes to your application
+ Keep it simple
Best Practices

31. + Know the technology
+ Use the best tool for the job
+ Apples to Apples migration might be easier
+ Migrating to a different protocol might open many possibilities
+ PoC the technology
+ Application integration, smoke tests
+ Performance comparison
+ Cost
Do’s and Don’ts

32. + Use the best tool for the job
+ When interacting with DDB use default libraries
+ CQL Shard-aware drivers
+ Full compatibility is impossible
+ Direct S3 export
+ Lambda triggers
+ CloudFormation integration for creating tables
Do’s and Don’ts - Cont'd

33. Conclusion

34. Conclusion
+ ScyllaDB University is 100% FREE
+ Lessons on Alternator and CQL
+ Migration
+ Many useful blogs
+ Customer success stories
+ Migrating from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB can be extremely beneficial
+ Easy to get started
+ Also available as a Managed Service

35. A ScyllaDB Community
Extreme Scale Engineering | ONLINE | MARCH 11 + 12

36. Thank you
for joining us today.
@scylladb scylladb/
slack.scylladb.com
@scylladb company/scylladb/
scylladb/