Know before you go: Amazon DynamoDB sessions at AWS re:Invent 2024

It’s November, which means that AWS re:Invent 2024 is just around the corner! We’ve summarized a list of re:Invent sessions that include Amazon DynamoDB. We encourage readers who are interested in learning more about DynamoDB to bookmark this list to streamline how you schedule your conference week in Las Vegas this year.

Keynotes and leadership sessions

Hear from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DynamoDB leaders about the latest innovations and trends in cloud computing.

Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services Utility Computing
KEY001, Keynote
Monday, December 2, 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM PST
Join Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing, as he continues the Monday Night Live tradition of diving deep into the technology that powers AWS services. Get a closer look at how our unique approach and culture of innovation help create leading-edge solutions across the entire spectrum, from silicon to services—without compromising on performance or cost.

Matt Garman, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services
KEY002, Keynote
Tuesday, December 3, 8:00 AM – 10:30 AM PST
Join AWS CEO Matt Garman to hear how AWS is innovating across every aspect of the world’s leading cloud. He explores how we are reinventing foundational building blocks as well as developing brand new experiences, all to empower customers and partners with what they need to build a better future.

Deep dive into Amazon DynamoDB
DAT406, Breakout session
Tuesday, December 3, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST
In this session, dive deep into the architecture behind DynamoDB, sharing insights into how DynamoDB is architected, and how it delivers exceptional scalability, performance, and reliability, as you explore in-depth how DynamoDB’s key capabilities, such as time to live (TTL), global tables, and MemDS have been implemented for customers to build their applications with.

Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence and Data
KEY003, Keynote
Wednesday, December 4, 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM PST
Join Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AI and Data at AWS, to discover how you can use a strong data foundation to create innovative and differentiated solutions for your customers. Hear from customer speakers with real-world examples of how they’ve used data to support a variety of use cases, including generative AI, to create unique customer experiences.

An insider’s look into architecture choices for Amazon DynamoDB
DAT419, Breakout session
Wednesday, December 4, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM PST
In this session, discover how the architecture of DynamoDB overcomes the limitations of relational databases to power the most demanding applications on the planet, and learn when and why over one million AWS customers use DynamoDB to build scalable, high-throughput applications.

Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon.com Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
KEY005, Keynote
Thursday, December 5, 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM PST
Join Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO at Amazon.com, as he shares the critical lessons and strategies he has learned for managing increasingly complex systems. The keynote explores the core principles for embracing complexity, drawing on Amazon experiences building distributed systems at massive scale.

AWS databases: The foundation for data-driven and generative AI apps
DAT201-INT, Innovation Talks
Thursday, December 5, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Join G2 Krishnamoorthy, VP of AWS Databases, and Jeff Carter, VP at AWS, as they share our data vision and innovation agenda to help customers modernize their applications to enable generative AI–enabled experiences for innovative user experiences. Learn how AWS databases are making it easier to integrate and manage your data, build highly available and resilient applications for your most mission-critical workloads, and seamlessly take advantage of generative AI advancements. Hear from Matt Swensson of NFL, Dr. Céline Laurent-Winter of BMW, and Sanjay Nair of United Airlines about the solutions they built using AWS databases as their foundation.

Data modeling

Take advantage of sessions that cover data modeling for users new to DynamoDB and those who want to learn advanced techniques.

Data modeling core concepts for Amazon DynamoDB
DAT305, Breakout session
Monday, December 2, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM PST
This session equips seasoned DynamoDB users with a comprehensive understanding of the core data modeling principles, common access patterns, and optimization techniques to build efficient, high-performing applications on DynamoDB.

Dive deep into Amazon DynamoDB using design puzzles
DAT302-R, Chalk talk
Monday, December 2, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM PST
In this chalk talk, dive deep into how Amazon DynamoDB works at scale by collaboratively solving a few design puzzles that may seem simple but are actually complex. Learn how you can look beyond the obvious solution to find a more effective and scalable one with an understanding of how DynamoDB operates.

Applied data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB
DAT401-R, Builders’ session
Tuesday, December 3, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM PST
In this builders’ session, learn how to turn a new business idea into a fully functional data model in Amazon DynamoDB. Discover how to translate business requirements into access patterns and access patterns into a fully optimized schema design. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Advanced data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB
DAT404, Breakout session
Wednesday, December 4, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Amazon DynamoDB is a popular choice for modern applications because it’s a serverless database that provides single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. Optimizing your usage of DynamoDB requires a different approach to data modeling than traditional relational databases. In this session, AWS Data Hero Alex DeBrie shows you advanced techniques to help you get the most out of DynamoDB. Learn how to “think in DynamoDB” by learning the DynamoDB foundations and principles for data modeling. Further, learn practical strategies and DynamoDB features to handle difficult use cases in your application.

Zero-ETL enablement

These sessions will highlight architecture patterns that help customers navigate considerations for designing zero-ETL workloads with DynamoDB. Zero-ETL is a set of integrations that eliminates or minimizes the need to build extract, transform, and load (ETL) data pipelines.

Relax and let the data flow: A zero-ETL pipeline
DEV314-R, Chalk talk
Monday, December 2, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST
Learn how to implement a robust real-time data visualization pipeline using a combination of Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB, with a serverless architecture using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and zero-ETL approach that simplifies data processing and transformation.

Perform vector search on your Amazon DynamoDB data using zero-ETL
DAT408, Workshop
Tuesday, December 3, 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM PST
Join this interactive workshop to discover how to combine the strengths of Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon OpenSearch Service to augment generative AI experiences on the Amazon Bedrock machine learning (ML) connector, learning best practices along the way.

Add search to your existing databases with Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion
ANT314, Chalk talk
Tuesday, December 3, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST
In this chalk talk, discover how the zero-ETL integration between Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon OpenSearch Service streamlines data replication and powerful querying capabilities to support a wide range of advanced use cases, from website search to log analytics.

Modernize multi-tenant monolithic apps with AWS purpose-built databases
DAT407, Workshop
Wednesday, December 4, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM PST
In this hands-on workshop, discover how to build a multi-tenant architecture that balances scalability and agility with robust data isolation using Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS).

Deep dive into Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integrations
DAT348, Breakout session
Thursday, December 5, 12:30 PM – 1:30 AM PST
In this session, dive deep into zero-ETL integrations between Amazon DynamoDB and other AWS services such as Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Redshift. Learn from our experts how these integrations can reduce operational burden and cost so you can focus on creating value from data—instead of preparing data for analysis.

Integrations

DynamoDB provides the flexibility to integrate with a broad range of AWS services to streamline how you build and run applications in the cloud.

Build a web-scale application with purpose-built databases & analytics
DAT403-R, Workshop
Monday, December 2, 8:00 AM – 10:00 AM PST
In this workshop, learn to build modern web applications at scale using purpose-built databases. Discover how to apply development patterns using Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon OpenSearch Service to build a fully functional and scalable bookstore ecommerce application, and dive deep into best practices along the way. Basic familiarity with AWS concepts and services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), networking, and storage services is recommended. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Cost optimization for Amazon DynamoDB
DAT321-R, Chalk talk
Monday, December 2, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST
Join this chalk talk to explore the mechanisms and optimizations that can be applied to reduce the costs of running your DynamoDB workloads, from architectural design principles to operational cost management tools that can help you along the way.

Building GraphQL APIs with AWS AppSync
FWM306, Workshop
Monday, December 2, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM PST
In this workshop, discover the functionality of AWS AppSync, a fully managed service that makes it effortless to develop GraphQL APIs. Learn how AWS AppSync handles the heavy lifting of securely connecting to data sources such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Lambda, and more. You must bring your laptop to participate.

AWS Amplify: Integrating data sources, authentication & AWS services
FWM314, Chalk talk
Monday, December 2, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM PST
This chalk talk explores how the latest AWS Amplify features can expand the capabilities of your applications by connecting databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL, integrating with a wide range of authentication providers like OpenID Connect (OIDC), and customizing Amplify resources like DynamoDB tables using the AWS CDK.

SaaS storage strategies: Scaling, securing & tuning multi-tenant data
SAS306, Breakout session
Monday, December 2, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM PST
From data partitioning to advanced multi-tenant storage models, this session equips software as a service (SaaS) builders with the knowledge to design a future-proof, scalable, and operationally efficient multi-tenant data architecture that can evolve alongside their growing business.

Microservices, API, cloud-native, and headless swappable architectures
ARC330, Chalk talk
Tuesday, December 3, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST
This session explores how adopting microservices, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless (MACH) architectures can transform organizations to create a more resilient, scalable, and business-aligned technology stack that supports iterative, agile development to meet evolving business requirements.

Scaling Prime Video for peak NFL streaming on AWS
ARC311, Breakout session
Tuesday, December 3, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM PST
Prime Video, as the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football, shares how it achieves a seamless, scalable live sports streaming experience by using a combination of multi-Region traffic routing, elastic compute, and a suite of AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate, and Amazon DynamoDB, to provide uninterrupted game-time coverage for millions of fans to enjoy.

AI self-service support with knowledge retrieval using PostgreSQL
DEV315, Breakout session
Tuesday, December 3, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM PST
Discover how to build an AI-powered WhatsApp assistant that uses Amazon Bedrock Agents, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) using Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases with Amazon Aurora Serverless PostgreSQL-Compatible edition, and DynamoDB to handle complex queries, provide personalized assistance, and manages support tickets efficiently. This session is ideal for developers aiming to upgrade their customer service capabilities with generative AI and databases.

Optimize Amazon DynamoDB performance using AWS SDK for Java 2.x
DAT414, Code talk
Thursday, December 5, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST
In this code talk, discover how to optimize the performance of interacting with Amazon DynamoDB using the AWS Software Development Kit (AWS SDK) for Java. See live coding scenarios that demonstrate how to minimize the latency of your DynamoDB interactions and improve throughput, and learn best practices for configuring your AWS SDK client. Get answers to your questions along the way, and hear the reasons behind the coding decisions.

Customer sessions

Learn how customers are building secure and highly scalable workloads on AWS with DynamoDB.

Klarna: Accelerating credit decisioning with real-time data processing
FSI319, Breakout session
Monday, December 2, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST
Klarna, a leader in instant credit and buy now, pay later services, must make fast and accurate decisions to provide a frictionless customer experience. This session shares how Klarna scales credit decisioning in real time using Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Glue. Learn how Klarna aggregates customer data points and condenses them into features such as past orders and outstanding debt to feed ML models that inform purchase approvals. See how Klarna’s data pipelines enable the company to rapidly ingest, process, and analyze vast amounts of customer data to securely power instant yet intelligent credit decisions.

Unlocking a unified experience: Hermès’s journey to composability
RCG205, Breakout session
Tuesday, December 3, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST
Hermès, contemporary artisans since 1837, created “veritable houses” for objects both online and in its international network of stores that differ from one another through their unique offers. To deliver this omnichannel experience, Hermès embarked on a journey to build a composable commerce system using a robust set of APIs, AWS serverless technologies, and managed databases. Learn how Hermès broke down data silos, streamlined the movement of products between their digital and physical channels, and created a unified customer experience to delight its loyal community.

How Vanguard rebuilt its mission-critical trading application on AWS
FSI322, Breakout session
Tuesday, December 3, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM PST
Learn how Vanguard rebuilt its retail investor trading platform on AWS to achieve higher resiliency, improve performance, and lower costs by scaling to meet demand. Vanguard adopted AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS to run this mission-critical platform, which uses cloud centered services such as Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon DynamoDB to store and replicate data across Regions, achieving 99.99% availability over the past two years. New features that Vanguard needed months or longer to develop on its legacy mainframe monolith now take only weeks or even days, enabling the company to continuously improve the customer experience and compete effectively.

How Duolingo’s culture of experimentation drives innovation
INO112, Breakout session
Wednesday, December 4, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST
Amazon’s unique approach to innovation is driven by culture, mechanisms, and our Day 1 mindset. Like Amazon, Duolingo’s culture is what creates unique customer experiences and drives innovation. The world’s most popular education app runs hundreds of A/B tests every day to improve the experience for its millions of learners. Whether it’s testing the motivating power of delightful animations or trying out new exercise types, Duolingo has built a culture that prioritizes experimentation across the company. Learn more about its testing mechanisms and tools, as well as the impact these tests have had on developing differentiated customer experiences.

Building a global SaaS platform from scratch, featuring Werfen
NTA310, Breakout session
Wednesday, December 4, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST
In this session, learn about Werfen’s AWS journey in building their digital platform to enable exceptional customer experience and better patient care through a specialized digital ecosystem that delivers advanced lab and clinical decision support. Explore how Werfen built a HIPAA-compliant landing zone on AWS and designed and deployed a multi-tenant platform using SaaS-first principles. Also learn about the technology stack components and trade-offs Werfen considered to achieve high scalability, operational excellence, security, resiliency, and data residency while building their cloud platform on AWS.

JPMorganChase: Real-time fraud screening at massive scale
FSI315, Breakout session
Wednesday, December 4, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM PST
JPMorganChase processes tens of thousands of payments per second across the globe. But with fraud threats continuously evolving to become more complex and detrimental, real-time screening at massive scale becomes essential. Learn how JPMorganChase built a fraud screening platform using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) that performs thousands of fraud checks per second within hundreds of milliseconds. Explore the AI/ML models that underpin the decisioning engine and reduce manual reviews, increasing accuracy and fraud mitigation by over 75%. Dive into the architectural decisions and trade-offs that inform this mission-critical solution built directly on AWS.

More DynamoDB sessions

To find all the re:Invent 2024 sessions featuring DynamoDB and other database services from tracks such as Generative AI, SaaS, Cost Optimization, Modernization, and others, visit the re:Invent 2024 Session Catalog and choose Databases under Topic. Download the official AWS Events mobile application on the iOS App Store or the Android Play Store to stay informed in planning and navigating your re:Invent experience.

About the author

Michael Shao is a Senior Developer Advocate on the Amazon DynamoDB team. Michael has spent 8.5 years as a software engineer at Amazon Retail, with a background in designing and building scalable, resilient, and highly performing software systems. His expertise in exploratory, iterative development helps drive his passion for helping AWS customers understand complex technical topics. With a strong technical foundation in system design and building software from the ground up, Michael’s goal is to empower and accelerate the success of the next generation of developers.