Question

A weather tracking application is built using Amazon DynamoDB. The performance of the application has been consistently good. But lately, the team has realized that during holidays and travel seasons, the load on the application is high and the read requests consume most of the database resources, thereby drastically increasing the overall application latency.

Which feature/service will help resolve this issue?

1. Amazon CloudFront
2. DynamoDB Accelerator
3. Amazon ElastiCache
4. DynamoDB Regulator

Answer 1

To address the high load and latency increase during peak times for a DynamoDB-backed application, the DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is the appropriate solution. DAX provides an in-memory cache specifically designed to enhance read performance and maintain efficient usage of database resources.

Step-by-step explanation:

The issue described is related to the performance of a weather tracking application using Amazon DynamoDB during peak load times, such as holidays and travel seasons. The solution that can help resolve the high load on the application and reduce latency due to excessive read requests is the DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX). DAX is an in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers fast read performance for your tables at scale. By providing an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the stress on the underlying database resources, thus maintaining performance even during times of high demand.

Amazon ElastiCache is used for caching outside of DynamoDB and is not specific to DynamoDB's use case. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that's used to distribute data globally, which doesn't directly address database read performance. Finally, there is no service called DynamoDB Regulator. Therefore, DAX is the appropriate service to help mitigate the described performance issues.