Should I use Aurora or DynamoDB?

Recently someone posted a question on Reddit regarding the selection of a database for their use case. They want to manage some game data:

Player name
Player ID
Status (active/inactive)

This blog has my take on the question.

Read on Reddit:

Amazon Aurora or DynamoDB?? from aws

Access patterns

Access patterns are known:

Search player by name
Search player by ID
Get player’s status

Writes & Reads

Writes are infrequent and there are 100 reads expected per day.

Go with DynamoDB?

Here is my take on why I would go with Amazon DynamoDB for this use case. Amazon Aurora is PosgreSQL-compatible/MySQL-compatible database engine. It is an enterprise grade database meant for OLTP applications that needs to deal with high volume transactions and throughput. This use-case will not take advantage of any of those capabilities. DynamoDB on the other hand is a name-value NoSQL database that is serverless, offers high performance & automatic scaling.

Use-case

Use DynamoDB as access patterns are well defined
Queries are simple name-value type
Joins are NOT needed; which are not available in DynamoDB
Aurora shines for Write-Intensive applications and this use case is not the kind of application that will get any value from a enterprise class database like Aurora

Ease of development

DynamoDB API are simple/straight forward to use
Simplified code means easier maintenance

Cost

DynamoDB is serverless with pricing control that can help with keeping the usage costs low
Aurora will require at-least one DB instance to be up and running at all times. Even with smallest instance we are talking about $100s per month

Operations

Much simpler to manage DynamoDB
No housekeeping tasks such as re-indexing/vacuuming/analyze needed for DynamoDB
For High-Availability, Aurora needs at least 2 instances to be up whereas DynamoDB is highly available as the data is replicated across 3 availability zones (at no extra cost)