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Choosing the Right Database in AWS: A Guide for Cloud Architects
Published in
4 min readOct 31, 2024
AWS offers a broad range of managed database services, from relational and NoSQL to graph and time series databases. Choosing the right database architecture requires a keen understanding of your workload, scalability, data access patterns, and overall database requirements. Here, we’ll break down the key questions to ask and the AWS database options available to make the best choice for your application’s needs.
Key Questions to Guide Your Database Choice
- Workload Characteristics
- Read-heavy, Write-heavy, or Balanced: Databases like Amazon Aurora or Amazon RDS excel for balanced workloads or those needing ACID transactions, while DynamoDB is ideal for write-heavy applications needing low-latency performance.
- Throughput Requirements: Understanding peak and average throughput is essential. Will demand fluctuate throughout the day? Solutions like Amazon Aurora provide auto-scaling for fluctuating needs, while ElastiCache handles extremely high throughput with in-memory caching.
2. Data Volume and Longevity
- Data Growth: Estimate the size and growth of your dataset. For unstructured or semi-structured data, DynamoDB or DocumentDB (MongoDB-compatible) might be ideal. If you’re handling…