DynamoDB For Games

When making games it’s impossible to tell how successful you will be.

While MSSQL and MYSQL are pretty good choices, their scalability and elasticity are issues.

AWS DynamoDB offers a reasonable alternative for indy games.

Check out this article on how to leverage DynamoDB for your games:

http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/bigdata/post/Tx27Y7HOQ4V6393/Powering-Gaming-Applications-with-Amazon-DynamoDB

From the Article it shows how Cost effective this can be..

Can I really support thousands of players for the price of a daily cup of coffee?

Yes! Let’s use the game-save use case to estimate costs. Suppose your game averages 100,000 active players per month. Most players aren’t active at once, so let’s estimate 1/10 playing at any moment. Let’s also assume these 10,000 concurrent players save their game state once a minute and the record size for each player’s data is less than 1 KB. Let’s also assume that each player needs to read their game state out of the database once per minute. Since there are 60 seconds in a minute, your Amazon DynamoDB table must support about 167 writes and reads per second (10,000 / 60). Most companies give themselves buffer capacity, so let’s round up to 200 writes and reads per second and throw in 50 GB of storage.

Based on current pricing in the US-EAST-1 region, this would cost about $4.16 per day!  You could support 100,000 players per day for the cost of a cup of coffee (one of the fancy espresso drinks, anyway).