DynamoDB on-demand was cheaper. Until it wasn’t.

A gaming backend ran 140 DynamoDB tables, all on on-demand capacity, because the team had read "start with on-demand" three years ago and never revisited. Half the tables had stable, predictable traffic. The DynamoDB bill was $48k a month. We rebalanced and brought it to $19k.

INDUSTRY

Gaming backend

DOMAIN

COST

DELIVERED

2024

STACK

DYNAMODB·CLOUDWATCH METRICS·COST EXPLORER·APPLICATION AUTO SCALING·TERRAFORM

RESULTS

What changed, by the numbers.

DYNAMO BILL

−60%

$48K → $19K / MONTH

TABLES REBALANCED

OF 140

p99 LATENCY

0% Δ

NO REGRESSION

THROTTLES

< 0.01%

AUTO-SCALING TUNED

HOW IT WENT

The team’s instinct against switching to provisioned capacity was traffic spikes — every game release caused one. But analysis showed only 14 of 140 tables actually had spike-driven workloads. The rest had steady traffic with daily cycles.

We modelled each table’s traffic curve from CloudWatch metrics over 90 days and recommended a per-table capacity mode. Tables with under 30% peak-to-trough ratio moved to provisioned with auto-scaling. Tables with bursty traffic stayed on-demand. Reserved capacity covered the predictable floor on the provisioned set.

Bill dropped 60% across the migrated set. Throttling stayed under 0.01% — well below the noise floor. The 14 spike-driven tables stayed on-demand and accounted for most of the remaining DynamoDB spend. The team now reviews capacity quarterly.

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