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Design: New Feature, Status: Public Preview

Tenets (unless you know better ones)

  1. Meeting customers in their problem space allows them to deliver value quickly.
  2. Meeting customer expectations drives usability.
  3. Discoverability drives usage.
  4. Providing a Java-focused experience for DynamoDB reduces the coding effort required to integrate with DynamoDB.
  5. Reusing the same nouns and verbs as the generated DynamoDB client meets customer expectations.
  6. Optimizing for cold-start performance allows customers the convenience of using object mapping in a Lambda environment.

Problem

Customers on the AWS SDK for Java 2.x currently use the DynamoDbClient to communicate with DynamoDB. This client is generated from the model provided by the DynamoDB team.

Because this client is generated, it does not provide an idiomatic Java experience. For example: (1) the client represents numbers as String instead of the more idiomatic Number, (2) customers must manually convert common Java data types like Instant into types supported by DynamoDB, (3) customers that represent their DynamoDB objects using Java objects must manually convert these objects into the item representation supported by DynamoDB.

Existing Solutions

This problem is not currently addressed directly in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x by any known third-party tool. In 1.11.x, several solutions exist, including AWS's own Document and Mapper Clients.

Proposed Solution

The AWS SDK for Java will add a new "enhanced DynamoDB client" that provides an alternative to the data-access portion of the generated DynamoDB APIs. Only limited control-plane operations will be available, specifically 'createTable'.

This enhanced client will make DynamoDB easier to use for Java customers by:

  1. Supporting conversions between Java objects and DynamoDB items
  2. Directly supporting every data-plane operation of DynamoDB
  3. Using the same verbs and nouns of DynamoDB
  4. Support for tests, such as the ability to create tables using the same models as the data plane operations.

A fully functional public preview is available for this library. See DynamoDb Enhanced Public Preview Library.

Appendix A: Requested Features

Appendix B: Alternative Solutions

Alternative Solution 1: Level 3 Storage Library

A "Level 2" high-level library is a service-specific library built on top of the "Level 1" generated client. The solution proposed above is a Level 2 high-level library for DynamoDB.

A "Level 3" high-level library focuses on a specific customer problem instead of a specific AWS service. For example, customers frequently use DynamoDB to store time series data. An alternate to the proposed solution above, would be to build multiple Level 3 libraries, each focusing on a specific customer problem: a document database library, a time series database library, etc. These libraries would support DynamoDB as one of many backing data stores.

Instead of using traditional DynamoDB nouns and verbs (e.g. Item), a Level 3 library would use words more aligned to the problem domain (e.g. Document for document databases or Entry for time-series data). They would also expose operations more constrained to the problem domain they were trying to solve, instead of trying to expose every piece of DynamoDB functionality.

This solution would be better for customers that are more familiar with the problem they are trying to solve and less familiar with DynamoDB. This solution would be worse for customers that are familiar with DynamoDB and want to be "closer" to the service.

Customer Feedback

The Java SDK team collected customer feedback internally and externally, comparing this alternate solution against the proposed solution. Customers were presented with the following option comparison:

Option 1: A DynamoDB-specific client that combines the functionality of 1.11.x's Documents APIs and DynamoDB Mapper APIs in a straight-forward manner.

Option 2: A generic document database client that creates an abstraction over all document databases, like DynamoDB and MongoDB. This would simplify using multiple document databases in the same application, and make it easier to migrate between the two. Unfortunately as a result, it also wouldn't be a direct DynamoDB experience.

We requested that customers review these two options as well as a prototype of option 1 and a prototype of option 2, to let us know which they prefer.

The following anecdotes are from this customer feedback:

If [Amazon] can make something like https://serverless.com/ or https://onnx.ai/ which free customers from vendor lock-in, that would be a great Think Big & Customer Obsession idea. If [Amazon] cannot, I feel that somebody who is more vendor-neutral can make a better mapper than [Amazon].

Have you thought about contributing to projects which already exist, like Spring Data? https://github.com/derjust/spring-data-dynamodb

Both options would work well for us.

I think [doing option 1 and then creating a Spring Data plugin] might get adoption from a broader audience than option 2. It could be used as a stepping stone to move to DynamoDB.

I believe Option 2 does not make much sense. It would make sense to me to go for Option 1 and start a bounty program to implement a module to popular data access abstraction libraries such as spring-data mentioned above or GORM.

Maybe you could implement/support JNOSQL spec http://www.jnosql.org/

Decision

Based on customer feedback, it was decided to temporarily reject alternative solution 1, and build the proposed solution. At a later time, the SDK may build a Level 3 abstraction for DynamoDB or integrate with existing Java Level 3 abstractions like Spring Data, Hibernate OGM, and/or JNoSQL. This Level 3 abstraction will possibly leverage the Level 2 solution "under the hood".

Links

Features - The features intended for inclusion during and after the launch of the enhanced DynamoDB client.

Prototypes

During the design of the project, two prototype interfaces were created to solicit feedback from customers on potential design directions.

  • Prototype 1 - A DynamoDB specific API that focuses on making DynamoDB easy to use from Java.
  • Prototype 2 - A DynamoDB-agnostic API that focuses on creating a generic document database abstraction, that could be backed by DynamoDB or other document databases.

Feedback