Your guide to Amazon DynamoDB sessions, workshops, and chalk talks at AWS re:Invent 2018

AWS re:Invent 2018 is almost here! This post includes a complete list of Amazon DynamoDB sessions, workshops, and chalk talks at AWS re:Invent 2018. Use the information on this page to help schedule your conference week in Las Vegas this year. If you still haven’t registered for re:Invent and need some help convincing your manager, consider using this trip justification letter.

Level 200—Introductory

DAT201 – A Deep Dive into What’s New for Amazon DynamoDB
This is the general what’s-new session for DynamoDB in which we cover newly announced features and provide an end-to-end view of recent innovations. We also share some customer success stories and use cases. Come to this session to learn all about what’s new for DynamoDB.

DAT205 – Databases on AWS: The Right Tool for the Right Job

Shawn Bice, VP of Nonrelational Databases at AWS, discusses a purpose-built strategy for databases, where you choose the right tool for the right job. Shawn explains why your application should drive the requirements of a database, and not the other way around. We introduce AWS databases that are built for your application use cases. Learn why you should select different database services to solve different aspects of an application, and watch a demonstration in which application use cases lend themselves well to specific data services. If you’re a developer building modern applications that require high performance, scale, and functional databases, and you’re trying to determine which relational and nonrelational database services to use, this session is for you.

Level 300—Advanced

DAT303 – Protecting Your Greatest Asset (Your Data): Security Best Practices on DynamoDB
In this session, learn about the security features built into DynamoDB and how you can best use them to help protect your data. We show you how customers are using the available options for controlling access to their tables and the content stored within those tables. We also show you how customers are protecting the contents of their tables with encryption and how they monitor access to their data.

DAT311-R – Building Serverless Applications with Amazon DynamoDB & AWS Lambda – Workshop
Join us for this first-ever advanced design and best practices workshop, which is designed to demonstrate the breadth of AWS serverless offerings and how the components work together. In this interactive workshop, we review the evolution of an e-commerce company that starts with a low-effort serverless product catalog, scales to a million daily users, and then adds analytics and near-real-time monitoring. As we progress through the workshop, we dive deeply into AWS serverless services, such as DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Kinesis. We also use Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Cognito, and other services that enable you to optimize costs and improve performance.

Basic knowledge of DynamoDB, Lambda, and Kinesis is required. Please bring your laptop and power supply to this session.

DAT314 – Migrating Your NoSQL Database to Amazon DynamoDB
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) can help you migrate databases from many supported data sources to supported targets. In this session, we review how the combination of AWS DMS and the AWS SCT can help migrate your NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB and Apache Cassandra, to DynamoDB. We provide an overview of AWS DMS and the AWS SCT, and we demonstrate migrating a sample Cassandra database to DynamoDB.

DAT320 – Becoming a Nimble Giant: How Amazon DynamoDB Serves Nike at Scale
In this session, learn how Nike Digital migrated their large Cassandra and Couchbase clusters to fully managed DynamoDB. We share how Cassandra and Couchbase proved to be operationally challenging for engineering teams and failed to meet the needs to scale up for high-traffic product launches. We discuss how the flexible data model of DynamoDB allows Nike to focus on innovating for our consumer experiences without managing database clusters. We also share the best practices we learned for effectively using DynamoDB Time to Live (TTL), auto scaling, on-demand backups, point-in-time recovery, and adaptive capacity for applications that require scale, performance, and reliability to meet Nike’s business requirements.

DAT321 – Amazon DynamoDB Under the Hood: How We Built the Hyper-Scale Database of the Future
Come to this session to learn how DynamoDB was built as the hyper-scale database of the future. In January 2012, Amazon launched DynamoDB, a cloud-based NoSQL database service. It was designed from the ground up to support extreme scale, with the security, availability, performance, and manageability needed to run mission-critical workloads. This session discloses for the first time the underpinnings of DynamoDB, and how we run a fully managed nonrelational database that is used by more than 100,000 customers. We cover the underlying technical aspects of how an application works with DynamoDB for authentication, metadata, storage nodes, streams, backup, and global replication.

DAT325 – How Oath (a Verizon Company) Built a Multi-Region GDPR Application with Amazon DynamoDB
As Oath, a Verizon company, prepared for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance during the integration of AOL and Yahoo! internet properties, it developed and deployed a global user consent and terms of service application. The cloud-native service was deployed across multiple AWS Regions globally, and it used DynamoDB global tables to enable data synchronization. The service was launched in April 2018, scaling to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of Oath users.

DAT332 – Why GE Aviation Migrated from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB
GE Aviation sells $1.7 billion annually in parts and service through a customer portal called myGEAviation. To enhance the customer experience, the portal lets users input specific variables and build custom reports for later viewing. This application, called p-dataquery, was experiencing performance and scalability issues on their Cassandra database. In this session, GE Aviation discusses how it rearchitected p-dataquery by using DynamoDB to resolve those pain points. In addition, learn how GE was able to solve concurrency and capacity issues by using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) in their new architecture.

DAT333 – Real-World Use Cases for Amazon DynamoDB
Build (or test!) your DynamoDB chops in this chalk talk where we work together to design data models and solutions for real-world use cases using DynamoDB. Share your experiences and best practices, and ask questions of DynamoDB experts.

DAT341 – Migrating Financial and Accounting Systems from Oracle to Amazon DynamoDB
In this session, we discuss our learnings from migrating the financial ledger and accounting system that Amazon uses from Oracle to AWS. We share the performance and cost benefits to enterprises who migrate critical systems from Oracle to AWS. We also discuss the decision frameworks used to choose the appropriate AWS service for the appropriate application, and best practices in project management when migrating databases.

DAT342 – Implementing Microservice Architectures with Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda
In this chalk talk, we start with building blocks for reliable event delivery in microservice architectures using DynamoDB and AWS Lambda. We then discuss how to use these building blocks to implement eventually consistent transactional behavior and support for querying using a Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern in serverless microservices. Along the way, we discuss the tradeoffs and benefits of event-driven over request/response designs. We also go into the details of tuning DynamoDB and Lambda-based reliable delivery and processing pipelines for scale, performance, and cost.

DAT345 – How GumGum Migrated from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB
GumGum recently moved to DynamoDB from Apache Cassandra. In this session, we discuss the architecture and design decisions made in the process, including comparisons of different NoSQL database options. We also share the justifications and steps taken to plan and complete the migration process. Finally, we cover the benefits and outcome of the migration, including performance boost, cost savings, and maintenance reductions.

DAT347 – How Amazon Migrated Items and Offers for Retail, Marketplace, and Digital to DynamoDB
In this session, learn how Amazon.com used AWS DMS to migrate more than 600 billion records to DynamoDB in two months. We address horizontally scaling the application (and avoiding the problem of limited database connections), high availability, and cost reduction compared to Oracle databases. We also discuss DynamoDB advantages, including better backup and restore capabilities, point-in-time recovery, simplified architecture, and global secondary indexes.

DAT349 – Deep Dive on Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables
Amazon DynamoDB global tables provide you with a fully managed, multi-Region, and multi-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 table 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.

DAT352-R – Migrate Your Nonrelational Database to AWS
In this session, learn how to migrate a nonrelational database, such as Cassandra or MongoDB, to DynamoDB. We review how AWS DMS and the AWS SCT can help you migrate quickly and securely, and we show you how DynamoDB implements the functionality of your source database.

DAT357-R – Build Internet-Scale Apps with Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a nonrelational database that delivers reliable performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multi-Region, multi-master database that provides consistent single-digit millisecond latency and offers built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching. Come to this session to learn how to build internet-scale applications with DynamoDB.

DAT365 – Separating Fact from Fiction: Amazon DynamoDB Scaling and Adaptive Capacity
Planning to run spiky or unpredictable workloads? Worried that your traffic isn’t evenly distributed? In this session, learn how DynamoDB accommodates imbalanced workloads and eliminates throttling, so you can build with confidence. We dive deep into how DynamoDB shards your data, how partitions are managed, and how adaptive capacity simplifies capacity management.

Level 400—Expert

DAT401 – Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB
In this expert-level session, we cover patterns and data models that summarize a collection of implementations and best practices that Amazon.com uses to deliver highly scalable solutions for a wide variety of business problems. We also cover strategies for global secondary index sharding and index overloading, scalable graph processing with materialized queries, relational modeling with composite keys, and executing transactional workflows on DynamoDB.

DAT404-R – Advanced Design Patterns for Amazon DynamoDB – Workshop
This hands-on workshop is designed for developers, engineers, and database administrators who are involved in designing and maintaining DynamoDB applications. We begin with a walkthrough of proven NoSQL design patterns for at-scale applications. Next, we use step-by-step instructions to apply lessons learned to design DynamoDB tables and indexes that are optimized for performance and cost. Expect to leave this session with the knowledge to build and monitor DynamoDB applications that can grow to any size and scale.

Before starting the workshop, you should have a basic understanding of DynamoDB. Please bring your laptop and power supply to the workshop.

Summary

This is the first of a series of blog posts that we will publish about DynamoDB-related content leading up to and during re:Invent 2018. If you have requests for the kinds of information that you would like us to share in these posts, tweet or direct message us @DynamoDB.

About the Author

Craig Liebendorfer is a senior technical editor at Amazon Web Services.