title: How do I know how many partitions a DynamoDB table is spread over?
body: <p>Amazon's DynamoDB in designed for guaranteed performances. A customer must provision throughput for each of it's tables.</p>
  
  <p>To achieve this performances, tables are transparently spread over multiple "servers" AKA "partitions".</p>
  
  <p>Amazon provides us with a <a href="http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/BestPractices.html" rel="noreferrer">"best practice" guide</a> for dimensioning and optimizing the throughput. In this guide, we are told that the <strong>provisioned throughput is evenly divided over the partitions</strong>. In other words, If the requests are not evenly distributed over the partitions, only a <em>fraction</em> of the reserved (and paid) throughput will be available to the application.</p>
  
  <p>In the <strong>worst case scenario</strong>, it will be:</p>
  
  <pre><code>worst_throughput = provisioned_and_paid_throughput / partitions
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>To estimate this "worst_throughput", I need to know the total number of partitions. Where can I find it or how do I estimate it ?</p>