Can Amazon DynamoDB be used without local database?

Question

Since I'm not familiar with cloud services yet, I must ask.

If I'll use DynamoDB from AWS, would it needed to be installed on local? Or is everything handled on the server-side?

Answer 1

Update

As already pointed out by frisky (+1), AWS has meanwhile released DynamoDB Local for Desktop Development - please see DynamoDB Local for details, in particular section Differences Between DynamoDB Local and DynamoDB.

As of recently, this initial offering is also fully integrated in the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse and the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, see the following introductory blog posts:

• DynamoDB Local Test Tool Integration for Eclipse
• Amazon DynamoDB Local Integration with AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio

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Original Answer

You neither need nor can install anything local - please see the first paragraph of the Amazon DynamoDB product page for details, e.g:

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. [...] customers can launch a new Amazon DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation [...]. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases to AWS, so they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling. [emphasis mine]

Please note that you will likely install one of the AWS SDKs (e.g. the AWS SDK for Java or the AWS SDK for .NET) on your local development system though, if you are planning to work with DynamoDB, they offer various other Developer Tools as well.

Answer 2

If you require Amazon DynamoDB for local development/testing purpose, you can meanwhile run DynamoDB Local for Desktop Development.

Answer 3

In August 2018 Amazon announced new Docker image with Amazon DynamoDB Local onboard. It does not require downloading and running any JARs as well as adding using third-party OS-specific binaries like sqlite4java.

It is as simple as starting a Docker container before the tests:

docker run -p 8000:8000 amazon/dynamodb-local

You can do that manually for local development, as described above, or use it in your CI pipeline. Many CI services provide an ability to start additional containers during the pipeline that can provide dependencies for your tests.