AWS DynamoDB and Disaster Recovery

February 29, 2016 #aws #database #disasterrecovery

AWS DynamoDB (managed NoSQL database) appears to lag behind AWS RDS (managed relational database) w.r.t. some disaster recovery features:

Backup/Restore
Cross Region Replication
Encryption at Rest

Backup/Restore

There is no “checkbox” for backup/restore and seems to require either using Data Pipeline and/or DynamoDB Streams to orchestrate. See DynamoDB: Backup & Recovery Solution for a potential solution.

Cross Region Replication

There is no “checkbox” for replication. The official documentation has a “how to” article (Cross-Region Replication Using DynamoDB Streams - Amazon DynamoDB ) on using an awslabs open source solution: GitHub - awslabs/dynamodb-cross-region-library: A library to facilitate cross-region replication with Amazon DynamoDB Streams

Other replication options are discussed at Planning for failures with Amazon DynamoDB | Sungard AS CTO Labs Blog

Encryption at Rest

There is no “checkbox” for server-side encryption at rest and any solution requires client-side encryption.

RDS, S3, and EBS all support server-side encryption.

Summary

AWS DynamoDB does not have the same “checkbox” features related to disaster recovery that other AWS PaaS solutions include. Therefore, any solution that is looking at this managed NoSQL offering needs to manage these features as part of the application infrastructure.