# Amazon DynamoDB

> I've never had a use case it fits better than Postgres with JSONB.

- Verdict: Never
- Vendor: AWS
- Layer: [Data](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/layers/data.md)
- Last reviewed: 18 October 2026, by Nicolas Dao (Cloudless Labs, Sydney)
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws-dynamodb/. The whole stack in one file: https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/brief.md

To be fair: acknowledged writes are durable, and strongly consistent reads exist for tables. That explains my experience; it doesn't change the verdict. Postgres with JSONB "NoSQL tables" covers every case I've met. Argue with me.

## Don't use it when

- At my clients' scale, always. A huge, simple key-value workload might justify NoSQL, and even then I'd look beyond DynamoDB.

## In my words: what hurts

- I was never sure writes really landed.
- Eventual consistency left me waiting for data.
- The query model is hard to reason about.

## Gotchas, with fixes

- **Gotcha:** Reads are eventually consistent by default, so a read right after a write can miss it.
  **Fix:** Use strongly consistent reads (tables only, not global secondary indexes), or use Postgres.

## Provisioning

Official Pulumi package · Official Terraform provider

## Use instead

Postgres on Neon, with JSONB for the document-shaped data.

## Alternatives

- [Neon (serverless Postgres)](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/neon/index.md): Relational data plus JSONB documents.

## Where it fits

- [A database](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/use-cases/database.md): don't. You design every query up front and pay for it in rewrites when the app changes. Postgres with JSONB gives you documents and SQL in one place, and covers every case I've met. Instead: [Neon (serverless Postgres)](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/neon/index.md).

## Related

- [Data](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/layers/data.md): every tool in this layer, with its verdict
- [The whole stack in one file](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/brief.md): every use case and tool, for questions that span many
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)