AWS Databases Deep Dive: Season 1 Recap

Databases are ubiquitous, powering the data storage, access, and retrieval functions needed by most applications we use on the internet today. With a constantly expanding landscape of implementation options and acronyms, it’s often difficult to understand where to begin (nonetheless figuring out how to choose one option over another).

Last year, some teammates and I came together to attempt to ameliorate this issue for database users on AWS. While there’s a vast body of “getting started” content out there, we felt there was a gap in highly technical content that extended beyond the format of one-to-many style re:Invent talks.

Knowing this, our show started to take shape: my co-host Randall Hunt and I would bring on a special guest each week from the teams that build these database services, diving deep on each offering from AWS. While there would be some slides, the goal would be for the format to be conversational in nature: expounding on explanations, performance questions, hypotheticals, and everything in between — all integrating questions from twitch chat, no matter how difficult.

While many nuanced, technical questions are answered initially with “it depends”, we aimed to go a step further so that developers could develop an understanding of the questions to ask themselves in order to arrive at the best tool for the job.

The unifying value propositions we aimed to return to week after week were:

1. Deepen the understanding of features and tools available for database services you may already already using

2. Broaden your horizons by exposing you to database offerings that may be better suited for a particular task you face

3. Offer a glimpse of how these services operate under the hood to achieve performance at scale

So, over the course of 3.5 months, we went live on *twitch.tv/aws* weekly, rain or shine, every Tuesday at Noon pacific. In total, Season 1 resulted in a 13 episode series (with countless topics left over for us to cover in season 2).

To view any of the episodes on demand (with chatlogs replaying as they occurred during the broadcast) check out the full playlist available on Twitch here.

Season 1 Episode List

Overview

• Ep1 — How to Choose The Right Database for the Job with Joe Idziorek

NoSQL Databases

• Ep2 — Scaling Up With DynamoDB with Rick Houlihan

• Ep4 — Manage & Scale Semi-structured Data with Amazon DocumentDB with Joe Idziorek

SQL/Relational Databases

• Ep3 — Amazon Aurora: Architecting the Relational Database Built for the Cloud with Yoav Eilat

• Ep5 — Aurora Storage: Scalability and Reliability for Relational Data with Yuri Volobuev

• Ep6 — Aurora Serverless: What’s Up with Serverless Databases? with Anoop Gupta

• Ep10 —Amazon Aurora: Why are so many people migrating to PostgreSQL? with Denis Lussier

• Ep13 — What’s New with Serverless Relational Databases? *(ft. Amazon RDS Data API) *with Nitesh Mehta and Lawrence Webley

Graph Databases

• Ep7 —* Amazon Neptune:* Graph Databases Demystified with Brad Bebee

Caching

• Ep8 — Redis & Amazon ElastiCache: Building Real Time Applications with Mohan Varthakavi

Database Migrations

• Ep9 — Migrating Relational Databases to the Cloud with *Amazon DMS *with John Winford

• Ep11 — Migrating to the Cloud with NoSQL Databases using *Amazon DMS *with John Winford and Rick Houlihan

Performance Analysis

• Ep12 — Analyzing and fine tuning the relational database using *RDS Performance Insights *with Kyle Hailey and Mackenzie Kosut

Looking back

With Season 1 is in the books, I just wanted to say it was a blast streaming for all of those many hours, and that’s in no small part due to the excellent questions, comments, and feedback we received in the chat from you, the viewers. Whether you asked a deeply technical question about applying a database to one of your production workloads, or simply wanted to comment on our laptop stickers, the audience contributions made it all worthwhile for us.

tasteful banter is always appreciated :)

And they don’t stop comin’

In the meantime, we’re hard at work preparing for Season 2, which is right around the corner! As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated, and helps us craft an even better experience for you all. Want more demos? Customer use cases/case studies? Live coding? More elaborate guest introductions? Silly recurring rituals? Any particular guests you demand to see back? We’re all ears. Reach out over twitter, or email us at databasesdeepdive (at) amazon .com to let us know. If you’re interested in related content in the meantime, our channel also hosts an entire show dedicated to building on DynamoDB, check out past episodes here.

To follow along with what’s developing in the next few weeks, follow me on twitter for announcements, and our AWS twitch channel to get notifications when we go live. Hope to see you in chat!