In a recent blog, Felipe Cardeneti (Technical Director at ScyllaDB) wrote…
A look at the top questions engineers are asking about moving from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB to reduce cost, avoid throttling, and avoid cloud vendor lockin
A great thing about working closely with our community is that I get a chance to hear a lot about their needs and – most importantly – listen to and take in their feedback. Lately, we’ve seen a growing interest from organizations considering ScyllaDB as a means to replace their existing DynamoDB deployments and, as happens with any new tech stack, some frequently recurring questions. 
ScyllaDB provides you with multiple ways to get started: you can choose from its CQL protocol or ScyllaDB Alternator. CQL refers to the Cassandra Query Language, a NoSQL interface that is intentionally similar to SQL. ScyllaDB Alternator is ScyllaDB’s DynamoDB-compatible API, aiming at full compatibility with the DynamoDB protocol. Its goal is to provide a seamless transition from AWS DynamoDB to a cloud-agnostic or on-premise infrastructure while delivering predictable performance at scale.
But which protocol should you choose? What are the main differences between ScyllaDB and DynamoDB? And what does a typical migration path look like? I want to answer some of these top questions right here, and right now.
Why switch from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB?
If you are here, chances are that you fall under at least one of the following categories:
- Costs are running out of control
- Latency and/or throughput are suboptimal
- You are currently locked-in and would like a bit more flexibility
ScyllaDB delivers predictable low latency at scale with less infrastructure required. For DynamoDB specifically, we have an in-depth article covering which pain points we address.
Is ScyllaDB Alternator a DynamoDB drop-in replacement?
In the term’s strict sense, it is not: notable differences across both solutions exist. DynamoDB development is closed source and driven by AWS (which ScyllaDB is not affiliated with), which means that there’s a chance that some specific features launched in DynamoDB may take some time to land in ScyllaDB.
A more accurate way to describe it is as an almost drop-in replacement. Whenever you migrate to a different database, some degree of changes will always be required to get started with the new solution. We try to keep the level of changes to a minimum to make the transition as seamless as possible. For example, Digital Turbine easily migrated from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB within just a single two-week sprint, the results showing significant performance improvements and cost savings.
What are the main differences between ScyllaDB Alternator and AWS DynamoDB?
- Provisioning: In ScyllaDB you provision nodes, not tables. In other words, a single ScyllaDB deployment is able to host several tables and serve traffic for multiple workloads combined.
Keep reading at ScyllaDB as a DynamoDB Alternative: Frequently Asked Questions - ScyllaDB