AWS DynamoDB at Buzzvil

One of the main products of Buzzvil is Honeyscreen which is a lockscreen rewards app. Honeyscreen users can get points by participating in advertisement campaigns on our lockscreen or offerwall, or by simply unlocking the device. Points can be used to purchase goods from the store. As this so-called “points system” is the core of this product, it is very important that we save accurate data about how many points a user has deposited and spent. Originally we used MySQL RDS to run the points system. However, as the scale of the service grew, the number of points-related requests to the database increased exponentially, which caused a very heavy load on the database. Since this kind of heavy load may cause troubles, we searched for an alternative that can handle this situation, and found DynamoDB a NoSQL database provided by AWS. The biggest advantage of DynamoDB is that it is very easy to scale. So we are currently running the points system on DynamoDB to manage it in a more flexible way. In this article, I want to talk about how we designed the functions and structures of tables in DynamoDB to suit the points systems needs. There were two kinds of tables in the original MySQL database. The simplified version of their structures are as follow: amount table This is the table where changes to a use