DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) caching - Mini Project: Build & Apply

DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) Caching Setup

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple application that uses DynamoDB to store user profiles. To improve read performance, you want to add DAX caching in front of your DynamoDB table.

🎯 Goal: Set up a DynamoDB table and configure DAX caching to speed up read operations.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a DynamoDB table named UserProfiles with UserId as the primary key.

Create a DAX cluster named UserProfilesDAX with a node type dax.r4.large.

Configure the DAX client to connect to the UserProfilesDAX cluster endpoint.

Write a query to get a user profile by UserId using the DAX client.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

DAX caching is used in real-world applications to speed up read-heavy workloads on DynamoDB tables by reducing latency and offloading read traffic.

💼 Career

Understanding how to set up and use DAX caching is valuable for cloud developers and database administrators working with AWS DynamoDB to optimize application performance.

1

Create DynamoDB Table

Create a DynamoDB table named UserProfiles with a primary key called UserId of type String.

DynamoDB

# Your code here to create the DynamoDB table UserProfiles with UserId as primary key

Need a hint?

Use the AWS CLI create-table command with --table-name UserProfiles and define UserId as the HASH key of type String.

2

Create DAX Cluster

Create a DAX cluster named UserProfilesDAX with node type dax.r4.large and one node.

DynamoDB

aws dynamodb create-table \
    --table-name UserProfiles \
    --attribute-definitions AttributeName=UserId,AttributeType=S \
    --key-schema AttributeName=UserId,KeyType=HASH \
    --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5
# Your code here to create the DAX cluster UserProfilesDAX

Need a hint?

Use the AWS CLI create-cluster command with --cluster-name UserProfilesDAX, --node-type dax.r4.large, and --replication-factor 1.

3

Configure DAX Client

In your application code, create a DAX client that connects to the DAX cluster endpoint UserProfilesDAX.clustercfg.dax.amazonaws.com:8111.

DynamoDB

aws dynamodb create-table \
    --table-name UserProfiles \
    --attribute-definitions AttributeName=UserId,AttributeType=S \
    --key-schema AttributeName=UserId,KeyType=HASH \
    --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5

aws dax create-cluster \
    --cluster-name UserProfilesDAX \
    --node-type dax.r4.large \
    --replication-factor 1 \
    --iam-role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/DAXServiceRole

# Your code here to create a DAX client connecting to UserProfilesDAX.clustercfg.dax.amazonaws.com:8111

Need a hint?

Use the amazondax library to create an AmazonDaxClient with the endpoint_url set to the DAX cluster endpoint.

4

Query User Profile Using DAX Client

Write code to get a user profile by UserId using the DAX client. Use client.get_item with TableName='UserProfiles' and Key={'UserId': {'S': 'user123'}}.

DynamoDB

aws dynamodb create-table \
    --table-name UserProfiles \
    --attribute-definitions AttributeName=UserId,AttributeType=S \
    --key-schema AttributeName=UserId,KeyType=HASH \
    --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5

aws dax create-cluster \
    --cluster-name UserProfilesDAX \
    --node-type dax.r4.large \
    --replication-factor 1 \
    --iam-role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/DAXServiceRole

import amazondax

client = amazondax.AmazonDaxClient(endpoint_url='UserProfilesDAX.clustercfg.dax.amazonaws.com:8111')

# Your code here to get item from UserProfiles table with UserId 'user123'

Need a hint?

Use client.get_item with the correct TableName and Key dictionary to fetch the user profile.