DynamoDB Streams and Event-Driven Apps

DynamoDB Streams enable developers to build powerful, event-driven applications that respond instantly to database changes. It is a feature of Amazon DynamoDB that captures a real-time, ordered sequence of changes made to your table. Think of it like a continuous, chronological log that records every modification to your table's data. These streams allow applications to react to data changes immediately, without continuously polling the database.

Enabling and configuring DynamoDB streams

Enabling Streams is easy. From the DynamoDB console, navigate to the specific table. Under the "Streams" tab, activate streams by selecting the desired view.

Once we've enabled DynamoDB Streams on a table, the next important decision is choosing the right stream view type, which determines what kind of data will be recorded and passed to any consuming service, like AWS Lambda. The following types of views are available in DynamoDB streams: