Use Infrequently Accessed DynamoDB Tables To Save Big On Costs
Use DynamoDB’s Infrequently Accessed tables to save up to 60% on costs every month with very minimal tradeoffs.
DynamoDB Infrequently Accessed Table
A DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access table is a cost-optimized storage class designed for tables that are accessed less frequently but still require fast, millisecond-scale access for occasional reads and writes.
This helps reduce costs for data that is less frequently accessed.
An IA DynamoDB table class can help you reduce your storage costs by up to 60% compared to the standard table.
Use Cases
Some great use cases for IA Tables include:
Social media apps: older posts that are rarely accessed can be stored in an IA table
E-commerce sites: store historical customer orders
Time-based data: store this year’s data in a standard table and the previous year’s data in an IA table.
When Should You Use IA Tables?
To determine if switching to IA would be cost-effective for your tables, consider this:
Analyze your DynamoDB costs using AWS Cost Explorer
If storage costs account for approximately 50% or more of the overall monthly cost for a table, it is recommended to convert the table to an IA table.
Keep in mind that while storage costs are lower, throughput costs for IA tables are 25% higher than Standard tables
Implementation
You can switch between DynamoDB Standard and Standard-IA table classes without impacting performance or availability, and without changing your application code.
To change your table class to IA, in the table page, in the overview section, click the Actions button, and select Update table class.
On the new page that opens, select the option DynamoDB Standard-IA.
Click Save changes and you’re done.
“The ability to simplify the management and access to our long-term data storage while still benefiting from DynamoDB performance, durability, and data availability with the DynamoDB Standard-IA table class could help us further optimize costs and provide an even better user experience to our customers.” — Ofir Nir, Head of Data Infrastructure, Singular
Conclusion
Switching to DynamoDB’s Standard-Infrequently Accessed table class can reduce storage costs by up to 60% for data that is accessed less frequently.
The best part? There is no impact on performance or availability.
IA tables are ideal for use cases like archiving historical data or rarely accessed data (e.g. old social media posts).
Ultimately, IA tables offer a cost-effective way to optimize DynamoDB costs without changing any code in your application.
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