DynamoDB Table is nearing provisioned RCUs

Why do I see this?

One of your DynamoDB tables has consumed more than 80% of the provisioned read capacity units (RCUs) 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 capacity, it may start throttling read requests and failing them with an HTTP 400 code: Bad Request and a ProvisionedThroughputExceededException. This event notifies you when one of your DynamoDB tables has consumed over 80% of the average provisioned RCUs in the last 60 minutes.

How do I fix "DynamoDB Table is nearing Provisioned RCUs"?

With this event, you will be notified well within time to take necessary actions to prevent your application's read requests on a table from throttling and failing. You can start by getting familiarized with Amazon's read capacity units and capacity unit consumption for reads by various DynamoDB operations. Set sufficient provisioned capacity based on what your application requires. You can also use DynamoDB autoscaling to manage provisioned capacity for the tables in response to traffic.