Why Amazon DynamoDB Isn't for Everyone

So when you combine inexperienced devs, the lack of a clear plan for how to model a dataset in DynamoDB, and a managed database service that makes it really easy to ingest a lot of unstructured data — you can end up with a solution that spirals out of control even at a small scale. Lynn Langit, a cloud data consultant with experience in all three of the big public clouds, has seen enough of these botched implementations to be justifiably wary of businesses relying on NoSQL solutions like DynamoDB. … ### The Second Law of DynamoDB: At massive scale, DynamoDB’s usability is limited by its own simplicity. This is not a problem with the *architecture of Dynamo.* It’s a problem with what AWS has chosen to expose through the *service of DynamoDB*. At this point, we haven’t even touched on the issue of backups and restores — something DynamoDB doesn’t support natively and which gets awfully tricky at scale. The inability to back up 100TB of DynamoDB data was apparently a big reason why Timehop recently moved off the service altogether.