Why the DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a Better Cache

Amazon DynamoDBSometimes we just don’t get the performance from our IT systems that we need. A compute-intensive task cannot processing quickly enough, or a data-intensive task cannot read from the filesystem quickly enough. Solutions exist for various different types of performance problems such as parallelism and buffering. One solution a cache, which is effectively what the DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is.

What is a Cache?

Wikipedia describes a cache as:


To be cost-effective and to enable efficient use of data, caches must be relatively small.

AWS themselves offer the Amazon ElastiCache Service, which provides managed services for the Memcached and Redis caching engines. These engines will store both the result of an earlier computation, or the duplicate of data stored elsewhere. DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is only caches data from DynamoDB.

To use a cache, the usual steps are:

  1. The application checks the cache to see if the item exists
  2. If it does exist (a cache hit):
    1. read the item from the cache

  3. If it does not exist (a cache miss):
    1. read the item from the origin (this may take a significant period of time and/or resources)
    2. store the item in the cache

As the cache fills, flushing removes items to keep caches small. One algorithm used to flush data from a cache is Least Recently Used (LRU), but many others a list on Wikipedia.

Issues with Data Caching

Personally, I’m not a fan of caches or caching for two main reasons.

First, unless you have complete control over updates to the data, it is possible for another entity to make an update. You then have a decision to make. Do you invalidate the cache more frequently, or do you risk returning stale data? If you invalidate the cache too frequently, you lose the benefit of having the cache.

Second, the application needs to be acutely aware of the cache. It needs to check the cache, read from the cache and write to the cache. It still needs to be able to write to the origin and read from the origin. We’ve added complexity and an entirely different data store to integrate with which leads to more code, more libraries and more bloat.

How DAX is better

DAX is quite specialized. Applications which currently use DynamoDB but need even better performance are the intended audience for DAX. Those applications already make extensive use of the DynamoDB API to read from and write to DynamoDB.

In order to make it easy to use DAX, AWS made the API for working with DAX identical to the API for DynamoDB. In order to eliminate extra code dealing with the origin, DAX acts as a proxy. Instead of the application dealing with the origin when a cache miss occurs, DAX deals with the origin instead.


Using this model, you can test the performance characteristics of the application before the deciding whether to use DAX. After launching and configuring DAX, the application simply needs to point at DAX instead of DynamoDB. This takes just a few lines of code.


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