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DynamoDB 10-year anniversary Swami Sivasubramanian and Werner Vogels
The early success of the Dynamo database encouraged Swaminathan (Swami) Sivasubramanian (top right), Werner Vogels (lower right) and colleagues to write the Dynamo research paper, and share it at the 2007 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP conference). The Dynamo paper served as a catalyst to create the category of distributed database technologies commonly known as NoSQL. Dynamo is the progenitor to Amazon DynamoDB, the company's cloud-based NoSQL database service that launched 10 years ago today.
Cloud and systems

Amazon’s DynamoDB — 10 years later

Amazon DynamoDB was introduced 10 years ago today; one of its key contributors reflects on its origins, and discusses the 'never-ending journey' to make DynamoDB more secure, more available and more performant.

By Staff writer
January 18, 2022
8 min read
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Ten years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Amazon DynamoDB, a fast, flexible NoSQL database service that offers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.

In an online post on Jan. 18, 2012, Werner Vogels, chief technical officer at Amazon.com, wrote: “Today is a very exciting day as we release Amazon DynamoDB, a fast, highly reliable and cost-effective NoSQL database service designed for internet scale applications. DynamoDB is the result of 15 years of learning in the areas of large scale non-relational databases and cloud services.

“Several years ago we published a paper on the details of Amazon’s Dynamo technology, which was one of the first non-relational databases developed at Amazon,” Vogels continued. “The original Dynamo design was based on a core set of strong distributed systems principles resulting in an ultra-scalable and highly reliable database system. Amazon DynamoDB, which is a new service, continues to build on these principles, and also builds on our years of experience with running non-relational databases and cloud services, such as Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3, at scale. It is very gratifying to see all of our learning and experience become available to our customers in the form of an easy-to-use managed service.”

One of Vogels’s coauthors on the 2007 Dynamo paper, and a key contributor to the development of DynamoDB was Swaminathan (Swami) Sivasubramanian, then an Amazon research engineer working on the design, implementation, and analysis of distributed systems technology, and now vice president of Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS.

More and more, CIOs and organizations are realizing that it is going to be survival of the most informed, and those that put their data to work are the ones that won't just survive, they will thrive.
Swami Sivasubramanian

A decade after the launch of DynamoDB, Sivasubramanian says we’re “experiencing an amazing era of renaissance when it comes to data and machine learning.”

“We now live in an era where you can actually store your data in these databases and quickly start building your data lakes within Amazon S3 and then analyze them using Amazon SageMaker in a matter of a couple of weeks, if not days. That is simply remarkable.

“We now have the opportunity to help customers gain insights from their data faster,” Sivasubramanian added. “This is a mission that truly excites me because customers really want to put their data to work to enable data-driven decision making. More and more, CIOs and organizations are realizing that it is going to be survival of the most informed, and those that put their data to work are the ones that won't just survive, they will thrive.”

To mark the 10-year anniversary of the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Science asked Sivasubramanian three questions about the origins of DynamoDB, its progenitor Dynamo, and the future of DynamoDB.

  1. Q. 

    You were a co-author on the 2007 Dynamo paper. At that time, the industry was transitioning to a scale out vs scale up architectural approach. Can you tell us about the origin story for Dynamo?
    A. 

    To get to 2007, I have to start with 2004, 2005. Even as I was working on my PhD [Sivasubramanian earned his PhD in computer science in 2006 from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam] I was contemplating where I would work. Ultimately what convinced me to join Amazon as a research engineer intern [2005] was seeing how Amazon was pushing the boundaries of scale.

    I admit I was a little bit of a skeptic as an outsider. At that time, AWS didn’t even exist. But when I joined, I soon had an ‘a ha moment’ that, yes, Amazon was an e-commerce company, but actually it was a technology company that also did e-commerce. It was an interesting revelation for me seeing how Amazon had to invent so many new technologies to even support its e-commerce workload.

    As an intern, I was working as an engineer on amazon.com and during our peak holiday traffic time we experienced a serious scaling failure due to a database transaction deadlocking issue. The problem was caused by the relational database from a commercial vendor that we were using at the time. A bunch of engineers got together and wrote what we call a COE, a correction of errors document in which we say what happened, what we learned, how we fixed the issue, and how we would avoid a recurrence.

    I don't know if it was me being naive or just being confident in the way only a 20 something intern can be, but I asked the question ‘Why are we using a relational database for this? These workloads don't need the SQL level of complexity and transactional guarantees.’

    Peter Vosshall presents Dynamo at 2007 ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP).

    This led us to start rethinking how we architected our underlying data stores altogether. At the time there wasn’t a scalable non-relational database. This is what led us to build the original Dynamo, and which led us to write the paper. Dynamo was not the only thing we were rethinking about our architecture at this time. We realized we also needed a scalable storage system, which led us to build S3, and we also realized that we needed a more managed relational database with the ability to do automated replication, failover, and backups/restore, which led us to build Amazon RDS.

    One rule we had related to writing the original Dynamo paper was not to publish when we developed the original design, but first let Dynamo run in production supporting several Amazon.com services, so that the Dynamo paper would be an end-to-end experience paper. Werner and I felt very strongly about this because we didn't want it to be just another academic paper. That’s why I was very proud when 10 years later that paper was awarded a test of time award.

  2. Q. 

    What’s the origin story for DynamoDB, and how has the technology evolved in the past decade?
    A. 

    The idea behind DynamoDB developed from discussions with customers like Don MacAskill, the CEO of SmugMug and Flickr. More and more companies like Don’s were web-based companies, and the number of users online was exploding. The traditional relational database model of storing all the data in a single box was not scaling well. It forced the complexity back on the users to shard their relational databases and then manage all the partitioning and re-partitioning and so forth.

    This wasn’t new to us; these challenges are why we built the original Dynamo, but it wasn’t yet a service. It was a software system that Amazon engineers had to operate. At some point in one of our customer advisory board meetings, Don said, ‘You all started Dynamo and showed what is possible with a scalable non-relational database system. Why can't we have that as an external service?’

    All senior AWS executives were there, and honestly it was a question we were asking ourselves at the time. Don wasn’t the only customer asking for it, more and more customers wanted that kind of scalable database where they didn't have to deal with partitioning and re-partitioning, and they also wanted extreme availability. This led to the genesis of our thinking about what it would take to build a scalable cloud database that wasn’t constrained by the SQL API.

    DynamoDB was different from the original Dynamo because it actually exposed several of the original Dynamo components via very easy-to-use cloud controls. Our customers didn’t have to provision clusters anymore. They could just create a table and seamlessly scale it up and down; they didn’t have to deal with any of the operations, or even install a single library to operate a database. This evolution of Dynamo to DynamoDB was important because we truly embraced the cloud, and its elasticity and scalability in an unprecedented manner.

    Werner Vogel's introduction of DynamoDB on January 18, 2012
    Werner Vogels, vice president and chief technology officer of Amazon.com, introduced DynamoDB on Jan. 18, 2012 with this post in which he said DynamoDB "brings the power of the cloud to the NoSQL database world."

    We launched it on January 18th, 2012 and it was a hit right out of the gate. Don’s company and several others started using it. Right from the launch, not just elasticity, but single-digit latency performance was something that resonated really well with customers. We had innovated quite a bit, all the way from the protocol layer, to the underlying storage layer for SSD storage, and other capabilities that we enabled.

    One of the first production projects was a customer with an interesting use case; they were doing a Super Bowl advertisement. Because DynamoDB was extremely elastic it could seamlessly scale up to 100,000 writes a second, and then scale down after the Super Bowl was over so they wouldn’t incur costs anymore. This was a big deal; it wasn’t considered possible at that time. It seems super obvious now, but at that time databases were not that elastic and scalable.

    It was a bold vision. But DynamoDB’s built-for-the-cloud architecture made all of these scale-out use cases possible, and that is one of the reasons why DynamoDB now powers multiple high-traffic Amazon sites and systems including Alexa, Amazon.com, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Last year, over the course of our 66-hour Prime Day, these sources made trillions of API calls and DynamoDB maintained high availability with single-digit millisecond performance, peaking at 89.2 million requests per second.

    And since 2012, we have added so many innovations, not just for its underlying availability, durability, security and scale, but ease-of-use features as well.

    Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS | CUBE Conversation, January 2022

    We’ve gone beyond key value store and now support not just a hash-based partition but also range-based partitioning, and we’ve added support for secondary indexes to enable more complex query capabilities —without compromising on scale or availability.

    We also now support scalable change data capture through Amazon Kinesis Data Steams for DynamoDB. One of the things I strongly believe with any database is that it should not be an island; it can’t be a dead end. It should generate streams of what data changed and then use that to bridge it to your analytics applications, or other data stores.

    We have continued innovating across the board on features like backup and restore. For a large-scale database system like DynamoDB with millions of partitions, doing backup and restore isn’t easy, and a lot of great innovations went into making this experience easy for customers.

    We have also added the ability to do global tables so customers can operate across multiple regions. And then we added the ability to do transactions with DynamoDB, all with an eye on how do you continue to keep DynamoDB’s mission around availability and scalability?

    Recently we also launched the ability to reduce the cost of storage with the Amazon DynamoDB Standard Infrequent Access table class. Customers often need to store data long term, and while this older data may be accessed infrequently, it must remain highly available. For example, end users of social media apps rarely access older posts and uploaded images, but the app must ensure that these artifacts are immediately accessible when requested. This infrequently accessed data can represent significant storage expense for customers due to their growing volume and the relatively high cost of storing this data, so customers optimize costs in these cases by writing code to move older, less frequently accessed data from DynamoDB to lower cost storage alternatives like Amazon S3. So at the most recent re:Invent we launched Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access table class, a new cost-efficient table class to store infrequently accessed data, yet maintain the high availability and performance of DynamoDB.

    We are on this journey of maintaining the original vision of DynamoDB as the guiding light, but continue to innovate to help customers with use cases around ease of querying, the ability to do complex, global transaction replication, while also continuing to manage costs.

  3. Q. 

    What might the next 10 years bring?
    A. 

    When we started with DynamoDB ten years ago, the cloud itself was something customers were just starting to understand better — its benefits and what they could do.

    Now we live in a world where cloud is the new normal in terms of how customers are building IT applications, and scale is also the new normal because every app is being built to handle viral moments. DynamoDB itself will be on this continuous journey where we will continue to innovate on behalf of customers. One of the things we will continue moving toward is an end-to-end data strategy mission because, as I mentioned earlier, no database is an island.

    Customers no longer want to just store and query the data in their databases. They then want to analyze that data to create value, whether that’s a better personalization or recommendation engine, or a forecasting system that you can run predictive analytics against using machine learning. Connecting the dots end to end, and continuing to make DynamoDB more secure, more available, more performant, and easier to use will be our never-ending journey.

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US, NY, New York
The Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) organization of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of their ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. This Principal Applied Scientist leads the technical vision and execution for Amazon Advertising's performance measurement. Our measurement products and tools help customers understand the holistic impact of their spend on Amazon Ads and optimize their portfolios. This is a complex, multi-disciplinary scientific space spanning machine learning, causal inference, statistics and experimentation, natural language processing, and generative AI. As a GenAI-first organization, we build foundational and agentic models that power advertiser use cases across Ads, while empowering our Applied Scientists to directly build and ship products. You will guide a team of scientists with expertise across different domains to come together and innovate on some of the hardest problems in advertising, made more challenging by evolving privacy regulations and technological changes. In measuring the comprehensive impact of advertising, key challenges you will tackle include capturing impact: 1) both for identified and increasingly unidentified web traffic in light of an evolving global privacy landscape; 2) for outcomes across retailers, including both within and beyond Amazon; and 3) for both short- and long-term impacts of advertising. Key job responsibilities * Driving the scientific vision of the teams in your organization and you advise and influence its technical leadership on performance measurement models and products. * Identifying, tackling, and proposing innovative solutions to intrinsically hard, previously unsolved problems. You solve problems pragmatically, applying judgment and experience to balance trade-offs between competing interests. * Bringing clarity to complex problems, probing assumptions, illuminating pitfalls, fostering shared understanding, and guiding towards effective solutions. * Serving and being recognized by internal and external peers as a thought leader in modeled measurement in Ads. You will engage routinely with the broader scientific community, e.g. as a reviewer, program committee member, workshop organizer, or chair at peer-reviewed internal/external conferences. * Leading by example, with your papers, analyses, and code setting the standard in your organization for scientific engineering excellence. * Leading science and design reviews, aligning teams across your organization around coherent algorithmic strategies. * Influencing your team’s science and business strategy by driving one or more team roadmaps contributing to the organization’s roadmap and taking responsibility for some organizational goals. You drive multiple new product features from inception to production launch. * Guiding the career development of others, actively mentoring and educating the larger applied science community on trends, technologies, and best practices. You drive the documentation of scientific innovation. You attract bar-raising talent from academia and industry. * Staying abreast of academic and industry trends, knowing the state of the art, and building on top of existing solutions instead of reinventing when possible. About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, Data Science and Economist disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and Causal Inference with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, sales leaders, and other scientists with expertise in the ads industry and on building scalable modeling and software solutions.
Robotics Applied Scientist
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon is seeking exceptional talent to help develop the next generation of advanced robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building robotic systems that combine frontier AI, sophisticated control, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is an opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at an unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to develop tactile- and force-driven manipulation policies for highly dexterous, multi-fingered robotic hands and grippers. In this role you will research and build policy learning algorithms that enable robotic hands to perform grasping and in-hand manipulation in unstructured, real-world environments, using touch and force feedback as first-class signals rather than afterthoughts. Much of this work is grounded in reinforcement learning. To be successful you need to be highly motivated, dive deep, and deliver to the highest standards. You will demonstrate strong working knowledge of modern policy learning methods, with expertise in taking algorithms from simulation onto real hardware. That means being comfortable working against real physical constraints and treating sim-to-real as a core research problem rather than optimizing for benchmark numbers alone. You will work across tactile signal processing, contact-rich manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, and multi-modal sensor fusion to build robust solutions for autonomous grasping, dexterous re-orientation, and fine motor control. You will bring the desire to learn from new challenges, and the problem-solving and communication skills to work within a highly interactive and experienced team. Key job responsibilities - Design and train manipulation policies that leverage tactile and force feedback for dexterous grasping, in-hand manipulation, and contact-rich tasks, using reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or hybrid approaches. - Drive sim-to-real transfer, closing the gap between simulated and physical performance on real robotic hands. - Shape objectives and control strategies with the hardware in mind, accounting for how motors and actuators actually behave: transmission ratios, torque versus power, backdrivability, and thermal limits. - Build simulation-based and on-robot evaluation frameworks, with benchmarks and metrics that make tactile perception and policy performance systematically comparable across iterations. - Own scientific and technical projects within the tactile sensing and manipulation workstreams, driving from research concept through deployment on physical robotic systems — and, at the senior level, set direction across a workstream. - Collaborate with hardware, mechanical design, firmware, and controls teams — and with partner applied science organizations — to translate research advances into deployable robotic capabilities, and to inform sensor and actuator design decisions with policy-level requirements. - Publish at top-tier venues and build collaborations with the external research community. - Contribute to a strong scientific bar on the team through code and design review, and mentor engineers and interns working on real-world manipulation and sensing problems. A day in the life Your morning might start with a standup alongside hardware and controls engineers reviewing overnight sim-to-real training runs on a multi-finger gripper, debugging why a grasp policy that worked in simulation is slipping on a real sensor array. Mid-morning you join the weekly tactile sensing workstream to align on sensor integration milestones and share early results from a contact-state estimator you have been prototyping. After lunch you spend a focused block iterating on a reinforcement learning reward formulation, testing variations in simulation before queuing runs on the cluster. Later you pair with a mechanical engineer to review sensor placement trade-offs on an upcoming gripper revision, then wrap the day by drafting a short experiment write-up and sketching next steps for a conference submission. No two days look exactly the same: one week you may be collecting teleoperated demonstrations on the physical robot to seed an imitation learning pipeline; the next you could be deep in a codebase refactor to support a new tactile modality. Throughout, you balance hands-on research — writing algorithms, running experiments, analyzing data — with cross-team collaboration and mentoring. The common thread is moving from research insight to working capability on real hardware, with a tight feedback loop between simulation and the physical world. About the team Our is developing next-generation manipulation capabilities for highly dexterous multi-fingered grippers and hands. Our work spans tactile sensor development, manipulation policy learning, and the tight integration of sensing hardware with intelligent control software. We are building systems that can feel, adapt, and manipulate with human-level dexterity. You will join a team working at the frontier of tactile sensing and contact-rich manipulation, helping define how robots perceive and interact with objects through touch. Because we build the hands as well as the policies that drive them, you will have a direct line to the sensor, actuator, and mechanism designs your algorithms depend on — and real influence over how they evolve. This is an opportunity to solve hard problems across perception, learning, and physical interaction alongside a team of scientists and engineers building toward real-world deployment.
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