DynamoDB On Demand Provisioned Cost Optimization

Provisioned capacity mode is an option when you have predictable application traffic and you use the autoscaling to adjust the capacity in response to changing traffic. However you will get throttled if the request rate exceeds the provisioned capacity. Note that it is very unlikely to operate at 100% utilization of the provisioned capacity to be cost efficient. You can use the ReturnConsumedCapacity parametercin the request to see in the response exactly how much capacity the operation consumed.

Given that the customer has unpredictable request pattern, the On-Demand capacity mode will be more appropriate. And note that a newly created table with On-Demand capacity mode can serve up to 4000 write request units or 12000 read request units or a combination of the two. With On-Demand capacity mode, the requests can burst up to double the previous peak on the table. Note that throttling can occur if the requests exceed double the previous peak within 30 mins. It may be possible that the traffic rate may be different and if your spikes are too high (more than double) than the default capacity or the previously achieved peak request rate, then one solution is to go with pre-warming the tables to the expected peak capacity as per the spike you anticipate.

Pre-warming the table can be achieved by following steps when you currently on On-Demand capacity mode.

1. Switch to Provisioned Capacity Mode
2. Wait for 24 hours(You can switch between the capacity modes once every 24 hours)
3. Set the Write throughput to the desired peak value or 40000. [ You will incur cost of this high value of throughput until you switch back to On-Demand (few mins) ]
4. Switch to On-Demand capacity mode. This should sustain the provisioned throughput capacity values.

Here is a blog that describes how one of our customer was able to achieve a 90% cost saving by opting for On-Demand capacity mode and they too had a spiky workload.