DEMO: Creating a DynamoDB Database
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Description

This course introduces a number of different AWS database services that are commonly used with data analytics solutions and that will likely be referenced within the AWS Data Analytics Specialty certification.

As such, this course explores the following database services: Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Redshift. There are also guided demos on the AWS platform showing you exactly how to use each of these services.

If you have any questions relating to this course, feel free to contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.

Learning Objectives

  • Gain an overall understanding of the different database services available in AWS, and which service would be best suited to your needs
  • Learn how to create databases with both Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB
  • Learn how to create clusters with Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Redshift

Intended Audience

This course has been designed to help those who are preparing to take the AWS Data Analytics Specialty certification.

Prerequisites

As a prerequisite to this course, you should have a basic understanding of database architectures and of the AWS global architecture. For more info on the latter, please see our existing blog post hereYou should also have a general understanding of the principles behind different EC2 instance families.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to this lecture. This is going to be a demonstration on how to quickly, and easily create a DynamoDB database. Now, first I'll need to go to the database category, and here we can see DynamoDB. Now I don't have any DynamoDB databases sets up yet. So if you select create table, and you'll be presented with this screen.

So first we'll need to give it a table name, just call this my database and also a primary key. Now the primary key is essentially used to uniquely identify each item in the table. And the primary key is essentially comprised of a partition key. So let me just add one in. I'll just call this product ID, and we can slate either a string, binary, or a number. I'll leave that as a string. If we need to, we can also add in a sort key as well. And as we can see here the sort key simply allows you to search within a partition. Just remove that sort key.

Now essentially you can now create your table simply from providing that information, because this tick box here allows you to use lots of default settings that essentially fills in the rest of the configuration for you. So if you're happy with your table name and primary key, with these default settings for your table, you can simply click create and it's done. However, I want to uncheck the default settings so you can see the different configurable components used. So let's take a look.

Now, firstly we have our secondary indexes, so you can add a secondary index, and these allow you to perform queries on attributes that are not part of the table's primary key. Next, we have our read and write capacity mode, either provisioned or on demand. If we select the provisioned capacity mode, then we can select our read capacity units, and also our write capacity units.

Now scrolling down a bit further to auto scaling. We can set up auto scaling for our read and write capacity units. So when the read capacity gets to 70% utilization, we can scale up to a maximum of 40,000 units, and the same with the write capacity. So you can alter these figures if you need to, and change them to whatever values you need. As a part of that auto scaling process, DynamoDB needs an auto-scaling service link role to give it permission to do so.

Once you're happy with your read and write capacity units, we can then scroll down to encryption at rest. Now by default encryption is enabled. The default option uses a key that's owned by DynamoDB, and you are not charged for the use of any encryption keys in this default setting. However, you can use a KMS custom managed CMK, which is the CMK that you may have created, and you can select it from this box here, if you have any and enter the ARN, or you can use the KMS AWS managed CMK, which is this key here.

So it depends on the level of control that you want for the encryption key. First demonstration I'm just gonna leave it as the default. At the bottom here, you can add any text to a database if you'd like. So once you're happy with the configuration, you simply click on create. As we can see the table is being created. And once it's created, you can then use these tabs along the top to set up any alarms and review your capacity units set up your indexes, backups, etc, etc, etc. But for this demonstration, I simply wanted to show you how quickly and easy it is to set up and configure a DynamoDB table.

Lectures

Course Introduction - Amazon Relational Database Service - DEMO: Creating an Amazon RDS Database - Amazon DynamoDB - Amazon ElastiCache - DEMO: Creating an ElastiCache Cluster - Amazon Redshift - DEMO: Creating an Amazon Redshift Cluster

About the Author
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Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.

To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.

Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.

He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.

In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.

Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.