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Why do the problems that you state with RDS not true for DynamoDB? Does DynamoDB not run in a VPC?

It's a managed service by Amazon and you access it using the AWS SDK, for which you need an IAM role, so everything is secure. Whereas with RDS, Amazon maintains a database for you, which you just connect to using ordinary TCP. IIRC it's not even possible to run an RDS database exposed to the Internet (well, you can always install Postgres on an EC2 instance, but that's even crazier).

I see, but security aside I am not sure how the latency is impacted by having a serverless on a DynamoDB VPC endpoint.

BTW, you can expose RDS out to the internet.

I didn't say it was impacted in that case.

Interesting, looks like that might be possible after all, though the docs are a bit unclear how this would work from Lambda specifically, and it looks like it needs a NAT regardless. Guess I misunderstood the docs at the time. (This ties into my comment about inexperience being our largest mistake. :))

If you use DynamoDB, you don't need to run your Lambda in a VPC. With RDS, you do.

If you run your Lambda in a VPC, your cold start times get worse, so latency increases.

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