DynamoDB Streams is one of my favorite features of DynamoDB. It powers a bunch of cool integrations (hello, Global Tables and Rockset)! It also enables really useful patterns within your own applications, such as materialized aggregations or updates to reduce transaction contention.

My friend Rahul emailed me with some great questions about DynamoDB Streams. In responding to him, I realized a lot of this could be publicly available. Hence, this post.

I begin with some introductory information about DynamoDB Streams, but I don't go deep there -- the DynamoDB documentation on Streams is pretty good. The heart of this post is practical -- some common questions with opinionated guidance.