Scaling to 70M users: How Flo Health optimized Amazon DynamoDB for cost and performance

This article details how Flo Health, a women's health app with 70 million monthly active users, optimized their Amazon DynamoDB usage to improve cost efficiency and performance by applying the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

• Reduced Write Capacity Units (WCU) from 15,000 to 5,000 through strategic optimizations
• Implemented data type size optimizations, converting string timestamps to numeric Epoch Unix timestamps
• Used "dirty checking" to reduce unnecessary write operations by 50%
• Introduced Time-to-Live (TTL) to automatically expire unused data
• Batched update requests to minimize write operations and reduce costs
• Achieved a five-fold reduction in item size and eliminated database throttling incidents

By applying these techniques, Flo Health successfully optimized their DynamoDB implementation, reducing provisioned WCU by 60% while maintaining high performance and scalability.