Sebastian Estevez

Migrating data from one database to another is rarely simple. It often involves:
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Standing up infrastructure</li>
<li aria-level="1">Designing database schema for the target system based on the existing schema</li>
<li aria-level="1">Leveraging multiple (often clunky) tools with complex UX and syntax to extract and load the data, and performing data conversions, either with custom logic or third-party tools.</li>
<li aria-level="1">Cleaning up infrastructure</li>
</ul>
The DataStax Astra DB Data Loader enables you to load historical data from DynamoDB into Astra DB with just a few clicks. There is nothing to download, nothing to set up / clean up, and nothing to code.&nbsp;
With our recent <a title="DataStax Increases Customer Value with Continuous Optimizations &amp; Delivers 50% Price Reduction in Astra DB Write Operations" href="https://www.datastax.com/blog/datastax-delivers-50-percent-price-reduction-in-astra-db-write-operations">announcement</a> of a 50% reduction in serverless WRU/write operations, migrating data from DynamoDB to AstraDB&mdash;the only serverless implementation built on&nbsp; Apache Cassandra&mdash;has never been easier or more cost effective.
Price isn&rsquo;t the only incentive for write-intensive use cases like logging, time-series, and IoT sensor - even write intensive web apps and web services. Cassandra&rsquo;s write performance is unmatched. Your apps have the wings to go global: it&rsquo;s a new cost structure for operating in new geos/regions, reducing latency, and data sovereignty.&nbsp; Astra DB&rsquo;s consumption-based cost model combines with autoscaling to remove cost as barrier for <a title="4 Reasons Why Your Database Should Be Multi-Region" href="https://datastax.medium.com/4-reasons-why-your-database-should-be-multi-region-bbb0b24dacff" target="_blank" rel="noopener">multi-region deployments</a>. Astra DB&rsquo;s costs for serverless reads, storage, and transfer are already competitive, so why not seize the opportunity for both your read and write-intensive use cases?&nbsp;
For developers, Astra DB offers serverless DBaaS as familiar APIs. Use our SDKs to wire your applications to Astra&rsquo;s autogenerated API endpoints (REST, GraphQL, gRPC and schemaless JSON). Of course, you&rsquo;re welcome to use traditional binary language drivers. No matter what your workload dictates, regardless of how you deploy, it&rsquo;s easier than ever to connect your:&nbsp;
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Web apps and Jamstack apps</li>
<li aria-level="1">Microservices and FaaS (functions)</li>
<li aria-level="1">Embedded / sensor systems</li>
<li aria-level="1">Desktop client/server applications</li>
</ul>
Best of all, with Astra DB you can take your Cassandra skills with you to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and self-managed clouds. At Cassandra levels of reliability and scale and Astra DB price performance, there&rsquo;s no need to re-architect or rewrite as you scale: learn it once, take it with you anywhere.&nbsp;
Let&rsquo;s examine how this all works.
Taking the sting out of a complex migration task
Our goal is to make your migration effort as frictionless as possible.By adding a DynamoDB source to the <a title="Astra Data Loader Documentation" href="https://docs.datastax.com/en/astra/docs/astra-data-loader.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Astra Data Loader</a>, we provide a serverless loader that can be kicked off from the Astra DB console. Just provide the Astra DB Data Loader with access to the S3 bucket containing your DynamoDB <a title="Exporting DynamoDB table data to Amazon S3" href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DataExport.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">export</a>. Then, it will:
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Infer a schema from the data&nbsp;</li>
<li aria-level="1">Enable the user to tweak the inferred schema in the Astra DB console</li>
<li aria-level="1">Create the schema in Astra DB</li>
<li aria-level="1">Asynchronously load everything in a background serverless job</li>
</ul>
As part of the flow, you&rsquo;ll provide Astra DB with permissions to read from your S3 bucket by configuring a bucket policy in the AWS UI or console. The permissions can be removed once the data load is completed.
<img src="https://cdn.sanity.io/images/bbnkhnhl/production/8dd1915a07efc699eb5337e4a6fb2ab62237b6e6-512x247.jpg" alt="" width="512" height="247" />
Want to see it in action?&nbsp; Watch this video as we show you how it&rsquo;s done on our DataStax Developers Youtube Channel.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t forget to subscribe and ring the alert bell for more awesome content and in - depth, hands on workshops.
<iframe title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F1nvv8bVhRs" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Security and privacy
The exact IAM permissions needed for the loader include ListBucket, GetBucketLocation, and GetObject; they can be applied to a bucket policy as follows:
&nbsp;
<pre>{ "Statement": 
 [ 
 { 
 "Action": [ "s3:ListBucket", "s3:GetBucketLocation" ],
 "Principal": { "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::445559476293:role/astra-loader" },
 "Effect": "Allow", 
 "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR_BUCKET_NAME" 
 }, 
 { 
 "Effect": "Allow",
 "Principal": { "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::445559476293:role/astra-loader" }, 
 "Action": [ "s3:GetObject" ], 
 "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR_BUCKET_NAME/*" 
 } 
 ] 
}
</pre>
&nbsp;
Astra DB loads data from the bucket and the permissions can be removed once the loading job is complete. No cloud resources to clean up&ndash;everything spins to zero once it&rsquo;s done.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Give it a try!
Getting started with Astra DB is free up to 80GB storage and 20 million read/write operations a month, with no credit card is required. That&rsquo;s more than enough to have a go at migrating your DyanmoDB data. If you have a DynamoDB table and are curious about what the data and access patterns might look like in Astra DB, give the Data Loader a try. It takes only a few clicks.&nbsp;
Got a question or issue? The chat console in Astra DB console is staffed by developers, not salespeople, so if you get stuck, we&rsquo;re just a message away.&nbsp; Let us know how it goes!
Learn more
<a title="Astra DB Data Loader Docs" href="https://docs.datastax.com/en/astra/docs/astra-data-loader.html">Astra DB Data Loader Docs</a>&nbsp;
<a title="DataStax Astra DB product page" href="https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-astra">DataStax Astra DB product page</a>
<a title="Register for an Astra DB account" href="https://astra.datastax.com">Register for an Astra DB account</a>
<a title="WRU / Write operations price reduction announcement" href="https://www.datastax.com/blog/datastax-delivers-50-percent-price-reduction-in-astra-db-write-operations">WRU / Write operations price reduction announcement</a>
<a title="Key-Value Benchmark with Java 16 zGC" href="https://jaxenter.com/apache-cassandra-java-174575.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Key-Value Benchmark with Java 16 zGC</a>
<a title="Astra DB Document API" href="https://docs.datastax.com/en/astra/docs/document-api.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Astra DB Document API</a>
<a title="Astra DB guardrails" href="https://docs.datastax.com/en/astra/docs/datastax-astra-database-limits.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Astra DB guardrails</a>
<a title="Here, There, and Everywhere: Why DataStax Built a Serverless, Multi-Region DBaaS" href="https://datastax.medium.com/here-there-and-everywhere-why-datastax-built-a-serverless-multi-region-dbaas-50069a33b3b5" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Here, There, and Everywhere: Why DataStax Built a Serverless, Multi-Region DBaaS</a>&nbsp;
<a title="Apache Cassandra Documentation" href="https://docs.datastax.com/en/landing_page/doc/landing_page/cassandra.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apache Cassandra Documentation</a>
Connect with us&nbsp;
<a title="Join our Discord: DataStax Developers" href="https://discord.com/invite/qP5tAt6Uwt" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Join our Discord: DataStax Developers</a>
<a title="DataStax Community Platform" href="https://community.datastax.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DataStax Community Platform</a>
<a title="DataStax Academy" href="https://auth.cloud.datastax.com/auth/realms/CloudUsers/protocol/saml/clients/absorb" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DataStax Academy</a>
<a title="DataStax Certifications" href="https://www.datastax.com/dev/certifications">DataStax Certifications</a>
<a title="DataStax Workshops" href="https://www.datastax.com/workshops">DataStax Workshops</a>
&nbsp;

Migrate DynamoDB Data to Astra DB with a Serverless Data Loader

Sebastian Estevez

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