Use case
DynamoDB performance enhancement and cost optimization
- Pruthviraj Rajput
About the Customer
Sociavia is a SaaS platform empowering retailers to provide social shopping experiences directly to their consumers, bypassing third-party social platforms. Created to disrupt the online shopping landscape, Sociavia gives retailers unparalleled control over their users’ social experiences. By enabling collaborative shopping, corporate retailers can optimize conversion rates on their websites while delivering better user experiences.
Customer Challenge
The Sociavia application experienced performance issues due to insufficiently allocated read and write capacity limits, leading to frequent throttling of database operations for both the main database table and its associated indexes. This resulted in degraded application performance and hindered scalability. Additionally, improper resource utilization of DynamoDB has also impacted costs.
Solution
IAMOPS provided a cost-effective solution to utilize Amazon DynamoDB autoscaling in provisioned mode, along with CloudWatch alarms for automated capacity adjustments. This solution effectively balances performance and cost efficiency by dynamically adjusting the provisioned capacity based on actual usage patterns.
The solution included:
1. Autoscaling Configuration:
- DynamoDB autoscaling was configured with a 75% target utilization rate, allowing the database to adjust its capacity based on actual usage, thereby balancing performance and cost efficiency.
2. Capacity and Threshold Management:
- IAMOPS redefined the read and write capacity units (RCU and WCU) to better align with observed workload patterns, while also setting minimum and maximum thresholds for the main table and global secondary indexes. This approach ensured adequate capacity during demand spikes without overprovisioning.
3. CloudWatch Alarms:
- CloudWatch alarms were set to monitor utilization metrics and trigger autoscaling when predefined thresholds were breached. This setup allowed the system to dynamically scale resources up or down, maintaining performance consistency without manual intervention.
4. Monitoring and Optimization:
- Continuous monitoring via AWS CloudWatch provided insights into usage patterns, enabling further tuning of capacity settings to optimize for cost and performance.
Results & Benefits
- Enhanced Application Performance: Optimized capacity settings reduced throttling, improving application responsiveness for users.
- Cost Savings: By aligning capacity with demand, Sociavia achieved significant monthly cost savings on DynamoDB provisioning.
- Operational Efficiency: Autoscaling eliminated the need for manual capacity adjustments, streamlining resource management and reducing operational overhead.
- Consistent User Experience: Autoscaling enabled Sociavia to maintain performance during high-demand periods, minimizing disruptions for users.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full suite DevOps partner that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
IAMOPS stands at the forefront by offering the best DevOps solutions to meet the dynamic needs of startups and businesses in various sectors.
