New DynamoDB Table Class – Save Up To 60% in Your DynamoDB Costs

Today we are announcing Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access (DynamoDB Standard-IA). A new table class for DynamoDB that reduces storage costs by 60 percent compared to existing DynamoDB Standard tables, and that delivers the same performance, durability, and scaling.

Nowadays, many customers are moving their infrequently accessed data between DynamoDB and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This means that customers are developing a process to migrate the data and build complex applications that must support two different APIs—one for DynamoDB and another for Amazon S3.

DynamoDB Standard-IA table class is designed for customers who want a cost-optimized solution for storing infrequently accessed data in DynamoDB without changing any application code. Using this new table class, you get the single-digit millisecond read and write performance from DynamoDB and use all of the same APIs.

When you use DynamoDB Standard-IA table class, you will save up to 60 percent in storage costs as compared to using the DynamoDB Standard table class. However, DynamoDB reads and writes for this new table class are priced higher than the Standard tables. Therefore, it is important to understand your use cases before applying this new table class to your tables.

DynamoDB Standard-IA is a great solution if you must store terabytes of data for several years where the data must be highly available, but it is not frequently accessed. An example is social media applications where end users rarely access their old posts. However, these posts remain stored, because if someone scrolls on a profile to see an old photo from 2009, they should be able to retrieve it as fast as if it was a newer post.

E-commerce sites are another good use case. These sites might have a lot of products that are not frequently accessed, but administrators of the site still want to have them available in their store just in case someone wants to buy them. Furthermore, this is a good solution for storing a customer’s previous orders. DynamoDB Standard-IA table offers the ability to retain historical orders at a lower cost.

Get started using DynamoDB Standard-IA
Get started using DynamoDB Standard-IA by evaluating the best class for your existing tables.

Go to the table page and select Update the table class in the Actions dropdown to change the table class. Then, choose the new table class and save the changes. You can change the table class for an existing table to be Standard-IA or Standard twice every 30-days with no impact on performance or availability. All of the features of DynamoDB are available when using a table in the Standard-IA table class.

Moreover, you can also create a new table with the DynamoDB Standard-IA table class.

Availability and Pricing
DynamoDB Standard-IA is available in all of the AWS Regions, except the China Regions and AWS GovCloud.

For example, DynamoDB Standard-IA storage pricing in US East (N. Virginia) is now $0.10 per GB (60 percent less than DynamoDB Standard), while reads and writes are 25 percent higher.

For more information about this feature and its pricing, see the DynamoDB Standard-IA Feature page and the DynamoDB pricing page.

— Marcia