ScyllaDB vs. DynamoDB Benchmark: Comparing Price Performance Across Workloads

The blog post by Eliran Sinvani compares the price performance of ScyllaDB and DynamoDB across various workloads and pricing models, highlighting a significant migration of DynamoDB users to ScyllaDB Cloud due to better cost efficiency. The detailed benchmark analysis reveals that ScyllaDB consistently offers lower costs and better latency performance in most scenarios, with costs being 5X to 40X lower and P99 latency up to 4X better under typical workloads. The comparison indicates that DynamoDB's pricing complexity and higher write costs make it less suitable for data-intensive applications with growing throughput demands, whereas ScyllaDB's architecture—featuring LSM-tree-based storage, shard-per-core design, and advanced schedulers—leverages modern hardware to provide superior performance at a fraction of the cost. The study further illustrates how ScyllaDB can manage multiple workloads within a single cluster more efficiently, offering significant cost savings and better performance, particularly under the Zipfian distribution where DynamoDB struggles with hot partitions.