Amazon DynamoDB vs Redis

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Amazon DynamoDB

4K
3.2K
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195
Redis

57.3K
43.2K
+ 1
3.9K
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Amazon DynamoDB vs Redis: What are the differences?

What is Amazon DynamoDB? Fully managed NoSQL database service. All data items are stored on Solid State Drives (SSDs), and are replicated across 3 Availability Zones for high availability and durability. With DynamoDB, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

What is Redis? An in-memory database that persists on disk. Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

Amazon DynamoDB and Redis are primarily classified as "NoSQL Database as a Service" and "In-Memory Databases" tools respectively.

"Predictable performance and cost" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon DynamoDB over the competitors, whereas "Performance" was stated as the key factor in picking Redis.

Redis is an open source tool with 37.1K GitHub stars and 14.3K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Redis's open source repository on GitHub.

reddit, Instacart, and Slack are some of the popular companies that use Redis, whereas Amazon DynamoDB is used by Lyft, New Relic, and Sellsuki. Redis has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3239 company stacks & 1732 developers stacks; compared to Amazon DynamoDB, which is listed in 429 company stacks and 173 developer stacks.

Advice on Amazon DynamoDB and Redis

We are building a social media app, where users will post images, like their post, and make friends based on their interest. We are currently using Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. We are looking for another database like Amazon DynamoDB; how much this decision can be efficient in terms of pricing and overhead?

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Replies (1)
William Frank
Data Science and Engineering at GeistM · | 2 upvotes · 100.4K views
Recommends

Hi, Akash,

I wouldn't make this decision without lots more information. Cloud Firestore has a much richer metamodel (document-oriented) than Dynamo (key-value), and Dynamo seems to be particularly restrictive. That is why it is so fast. There are many needs in most applications to get lightning access to the members of a set, one set at a time. Dynamo DB is a great choice. But, social media applications generally need to be able to make long traverses across a graph. While you can make almost any metamodel act like another one, with your own custom layers on top of it, or just by writing a lot more code, it's a long way around to do that with simple key-value sets. It's hard enough to traverse across networks of collections in a document-oriented database. So, if you are moving, I think a graph-oriented database like Amazon Neptune, or, if you might want built-in reasoning, Allegro or Ontotext, would take the least programming, which is where the most cost and bugs can be avoided. Also, managed systems are also less costly in terms of people's time and system errors. It's easier to measure the costs of managed systems, so they are often seen as more costly.

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Pros of Amazon DynamoDB
Pros of Redis
  • 62
    Predictable performance and cost
  • 56
    Scalable
  • 35
    Native JSON Support
  • 21
    AWS Free Tier
  • 7
    Fast
  • 3
    No sql
  • 3
    To store data
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 2
    No Stored procedures is GOOD
  • 1
    ORM with DynamoDBMapper
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using on-demand mode
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using autoscaling
  • 1
    DynamoDB Stream
  • 884
    Performance
  • 541
    Super fast
  • 512
    Ease of use
  • 443
    In-memory cache
  • 323
    Advanced key-value cache
  • 193
    Open source
  • 182
    Easy to deploy
  • 164
    Stable
  • 155
    Free
  • 121
    Fast
  • 42
    High-Performance
  • 40
    High Availability
  • 34
    Data Structures
  • 32
    Very Scalable
  • 24
    Replication
  • 22
    Pub/Sub
  • 22
    Great community
  • 19
    "NoSQL" key-value data store
  • 15
    Hashes
  • 13
    Sets
  • 11
    Sorted Sets
  • 10
    Lists
  • 9
    BSD licensed
  • 9
    NoSQL
  • 8
    Integrates super easy with Sidekiq for Rails background
  • 8
    Async replication
  • 8
    Bitmaps
  • 7
    Open Source
  • 7
    Keys with a limited time-to-live
  • 6
    Lua scripting
  • 6
    Strings
  • 5
    Awesomeness for Free
  • 5
    Hyperloglogs
  • 4
    Written in ANSI C
  • 4
    LRU eviction of keys
  • 4
    Networked
  • 4
    Outstanding performance
  • 4
    Runs server side LUA
  • 4
    Transactions
  • 4
    Feature Rich
  • 3
    Performance & ease of use
  • 3
    Data structure server
  • 2
    Object [key/value] size each 500 MB
  • 2
    Simple
  • 2
    Scalable
  • 2
    Temporarily kept on disk
  • 2
    Dont save data if no subscribers are found
  • 2
    Automatic failover
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Existing Laravel Integration
  • 2
    Channels concept

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Cons of Amazon DynamoDB
Cons of Redis
  • 4
    Only sequential access for paginate data
  • 1
    Scaling
  • 1
    Document Limit Size
  • 15
    Cannot query objects directly
  • 3
    No secondary indexes for non-numeric data types
  • 1
    No WAL

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What is Amazon DynamoDB?

With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

What is Redis?

Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.

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What companies use Amazon DynamoDB?
What companies use Redis?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon DynamoDB or Redis.
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What tools integrate with Amazon DynamoDB?
What tools integrate with Redis?

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What are some alternatives to Amazon DynamoDB and Redis?
Google Cloud Datastore
Use a managed, NoSQL, schemaless database for storing non-relational data. Cloud Datastore automatically scales as you need it and supports transactions as well as robust, SQL-like queries.
MongoDB
MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
Amazon SimpleDB
Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest. Behind the scenes, Amazon SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Your data is automatically indexed, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need. There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. And scale-out is as simple as creating new domains, rather than building out new servers.
MySQL
The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
See all alternatives