Dynamo DB Stream Activity

Question

Has anyone experienced an issue when using Dynamo DB streams with items not populating the streams after a period of inactivity, in this case roughly 24 hours?

The problem that I am experiencing is (when prototyping a new solution):

1. I create a new stream in Dynamo DB (not a Kinesis Stream)
2. I populate items into a table via the API
3. I pull shards from the database and the new items are being processed correctly and appear in the shard (using New and Old image for reference)
4. If I then stop populating new items for a period of 24 hours, and then add new items they do not appear in the new or existing shards
5. The old items can still be seen when iterating the existing shards so it is slightly less than 24 hours since they were added, only the new items do not appear at all

I have repeated the issue on a few occasions and have tried to find an explanation in the documentation to no avail. Not sure if this is happening because I have a free account or if I'm missing a setting somewhere.

Answer 1

It is definitely not due to the free account.

DynamoDB writes data into shards(based on the partition key). Each shard is open for writes for 4 hours and open for reads for 24 hours.

That's the reason you can read but not write. This information somehow a bit hard to find in the docs. I found this reference and this in the offical code samples .