Adopting DynamoDB TTL enabled the CloudWatch team to cut its operational burden, since the team no longer has to manually manage table deletion and has lower provisioned capacity. “Because we can automate the process of deleting items from tables, we reduced our overall provisioned throughput for tables by 75 percent,” says Rodriguez. “And with that reduction, data-retrieval latencies were also reduced by up to 10 percent.”

The team has also been able to reduce its costs thanks to smaller table sizes. “We were pleased to see that TTL provided us the disk-space cost savings we expected,” says Rodriguez. “But it was a pleasant surprise that we were able to simplify our architecture, dramatically reduce throughput for our tables, and ultimately save millions of dollars annually.”

Most importantly, DynamoDB TTL enables the CloudWatch team to deliver the low latency its customers expect from the monitoring platform. “In our previous environment, we had to process multiple tables of data, aggregate them, and then return the data to our customers,” Rodriguez says. “Now, with Amazon DynamoDB TTL, we only need one table and we don’t have to manage the data-expiration process. The entire data-storage process is simpler, and our customers get their CloudWatch metrics faster.”