Incremental Backup Solutions
These guides cover a production-tested approach to incremental DynamoDB backups using DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda. Data is captured in native DynamoDB format and stored in S3 versioned buckets, enabling point-in-time restore without full table scans.
- Part One: Architecture overview — stream records, Lambda invocation model, and S3 object layout.
- Part Two: Storage format deep dive — how DynamoDB items are serialized and versioned in S3.
- Part Three: Handling edge cases — deletes, TTL expirations, and conditional writes.
- Part Four: The restore step — using Dynamo Incremental Restore to reconstruct tables from versioned S3 objects.
Related open-source tools referenced in the series include DynamoDb Replicator and Dynamo Migrator.
Streams & Lambda
Configure DynamoDB Streams to capture item-level changes and trigger Lambda functions that write incremental snapshots to S3. The series walks through IAM policies, timeout tuning, and batch-window sizing.
S3 Versioned Storage
Store backups in native DynamoDB JSON format inside versioned S3 buckets. Leverage the Get Bucket Object Versions API to retrieve historical snapshots for any point in time.
Capacity Monitoring
Detect read/write capacity exhaustion and partition throttling before they impact production workloads. Techniques include CloudWatch alarm patterns and stream-age metrics.
Partition Throttling
Understand how DynamoDB's internal partitioning can cause hot-key throttling even when aggregate capacity appears sufficient. Learn to identify and mitigate uneven access patterns.
Restore Workflow
The restore process uses the Dynamo Incremental Restore tool to replay versioned S3 objects back into a DynamoDB table. The series covers:
- Listing all object versions for a given backup prefix using the S3 REST API.
- Reconstructing item state at a target timestamp by walking version history.
- Writing restored items into a new or existing DynamoDB table with configurable throughput.
For large datasets, the guide also discusses using AWS Data Pipeline for bulk import/export as an alternative path.