Amazon DynamoDB is a flexible and scalable data store that is an ideal solution for many applications. Unfortunately, not too many popular open source projects exist that provide a high level abstraction similar to libraries like mongoose or any SQL ORM. For this reason, Dynamo has found itself having a much more daunting entry barrier for smaller, faster moving projects.
In this talk, we'll take a look at how our team tackled building a flexible Node.js library that made accessing Dynamo easier. From simple extensions to the AWS API like querying items and creating tables, to creating "models" for your documents. This will be presented from the view of a quick moving startup that wrote some simple code to make understanding Dynamo a bit easier which eventually became what we think is something that tackles most use cases.
Also covered will be the advantages and disadvantages of DynamoDB both in a general sense and in the context of a web application. We will also briefly take a look at using DynamoDB streams and AWS Lambda functions to perform "servlerless" processing against your database.
