DynamoDB has write throttles

Why do I see this?

One of your DynamoDB tables has exceeded the provisioned write capacity units (WCUs) in the last 60 minutes.

What does this mean?

AWS offers two read/write capacity modes for processing reads and writes requests on DynamoDB tables:

• On-demand
• Provisioned

As the name suggests, the on-demand mode automatically accommodates the read/write requests as they ramp up or down whereas the provisioned mode lets you specify the number of reads and writes per second that is required for your applications. If a table exceeds its provisioned throughput for WCU, it starts throttling write requests and failing them with an HTTP 400 code: Bad Request and a ProvisionedThroughputExceededException. This event notifies you when DynamoDB starts throttling one of your table's write requests.

How do I fix "DynamoDB has write throttles"?

Following are some of the things you can do to resolve throttling on DynamoDB tables:

• Make sure your table has suffiecient provisioned capacity based on what your application requires.
• Enable retries for throttled requests using exponential backoff.
• Distribute read and write operations as evenly as possible accross your table.
• Check the table-level write throughput quotas for your account. If the write requests exceed this quota then you can use Service Quotas console to increase the table-level throughput quota for your account.

For more information you can check out following AWS guides:

• Resolve issues with throttled DynamoDB tables
• Resolve throttling on a DynamoDB on-demand table