I really enjoyed Jeremy Daly’s Twitter thread (and later blogpost) on how to switch from RDBMS to DynamoDB in 20 easy steps. His definition of “easy” and mine appear to differ, but that’s okay. Reasonable people can disagree.
After reading through the tweets/blog, watching the videos, and gaining a basic understanding of the process, I thought it might also be useful to have a concrete example from the real world. So in this series of posts, we’re going to build a real-world application by applying Jeremy’s process.
Babbl: Chat Without Borders
Babbl enables users to chat in their native language with speakers of other languages! Babbl uses Amazon Translate to translate messages when they are first sent to users whose profiles are set to another language.
We’re going to build out and document the entity relationship diagram (ERD), data access patterns, and actual DynamoDB table and secondary index definitions to support Babbl. If time permits, we’ll go on to build an actual iOS app using AWS Amplify and Swift UI using this recent stream on Twitch as well as adding authentication with Amazon Cognito.
Disclaimers
I’m racing the clock to get this done before starting a new job (that I’m really excited about!) and while taking care of our infant son, so I’m going to err on the side of speed and make a lot of assumptions about your knowledge. If something is unclear, please leave me a comment or tweet and I’ll do my best to clarify.
