Company
Date Published
Author
Jean-Mathieu Saponaro
Word count
1218
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Medium, a popular online publication, uses DynamoDB as its primary data store to scale rapidly and handle high traffic. To monitor performance and prevent throttling, Medium employs several strategies, including tracking whole-table capacity, partitioning, and hot keys. They use Datadog to collect metrics on reads and writes per second, compare actual usage to provisioned capacity, and track throttled requests. Medium also creates custom metrics, such as a "Last Backup Age" metric, to ensure regular backups of DynamoDB tables and trigger alerts when necessary. By properly monitoring performance and using tools like Datadog, Medium is able to optimize its infrastructure expenses, reduce throttling frequency, and provide an excellent user experience.