Deshpande T. - DynamoDB Cookbook

Sergio Alcantara has been building cloud-based platforms since the beginning of Amazon Web Services. Over the years, he has built the backend infrastructure for mobile and web applications that empowered GPS data, big data, and sports gaming. He has taken advantage of cloud computing to build highly reliable and scalable platforms.

Among his latest projects, there are several that use DynamoDB in different ways, but two of them use DynamoDB as their main and only database. In one project, he utilizes DynamoDB to store large quantities of data (big data), and in the other, he took advantage of DynamoDB's high scalability to satisfy the demands of high traffic social and sports betting pool applications.

He also created several open source libraries, all of which are listed in his GitHub profile (https://github.com/serg-io). The most notable of these libraries being backbone-dynamodb, which extends Backbone, a popular JavaScript library, in order to allow the developer to store Backbone data models in DynamoDB.

Kenny Ha is currently working as a Senior Systems Architect at a local private company in San Diego. He is passionate about learning new technologies, especially about the mobile internet and data structures. He developed a passion for programming and data structures in the fall of 1992, at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and has been devoted to it ever since. Nowadays, he's intrigued with the entire mobile internet ecosystem and is trying to learn more about it.

All this is thanks to his childhood best friend, who advised him to switch his major from Electrical Engineering to Computer Science. He appreciates this advice till date and is very proud of his decision. His university years were all about learning and doing what interests him, which is programming, more than doing his required coursework. Throughout his career, he has designed scalable distributed enterprise systems with strong data structures and database concepts that he learnt in his university.

He has worked on many projects that involved distributed computing and processing. He realized that technology has evolved fairly rapidly, starting from the old CORBA days to the modern days of distributed service-oriented web services. He's currently involved with learning more advanced theoretical concepts related to computer science, in order to understand the theoretical concepts taught in universities and transform them into programmable implementation of working code, which includes mobile advancements. One of the exciting projects he has designed is a Global Positioning System project. He designed a hybrid database structure to manage the mobile GPS devices on golf carts and automobile industries. These hybrid database structures included a RDBMS and NoSQL(DynamoDB) to persist high-volume GPS coordinates in millions. He said that the most fun and exciting part of the project was a multi-threaded parallel Java program, which persisted data to DynamoDB while a Node.JS program projected the GPS coordinates on the web page to allow for the viewing of the golf carts traveling in real time.

The most important concept here is that the business requirements will always dictate the architectural designs of a system. Therefore, make sure to adopt the best practices of good software designs for effectiveness, efficiency, and user-friendliness. In the future, there will always be new innovative ecosystems that will disrupt the current technology and market trends, including the mobile Internet. We are definitely looking forward to these ecosystems being taught at universities.