Introduction
Flo Health, the world’s leading women’s health app, serves an impressive 70 million monthly active users. With their Stories feature becoming increasingly popular, the team faced the challenge of scaling their database infrastructure while maintaining cost efficiency.
The Foundation: Stories Feature and DynamoDB
The Stories feature provides personalized health insights through a dynamic content stream. DynamoDB was chosen for its scalability, speed, and flexibility, successfully handling traffic growth from 20 million to 70+ million monthly active users.
Implementation of AWS Well-Architected Framework
Flo Health conducted a comprehensive review focusing on cost optimization, implementing several key strategies:
- Thorough assessment of DynamoDB usage patterns
- Analysis of capacity modes and utilization
- Implementation of auto-scaling
- Optimization of indexing strategies
- Enhanced data archiving with TTL management
Data Optimization Strategies
The team implemented several innovative optimization techniques:
- Conversion of string timestamps to numeric format
- Implementation of Story ID indexing
- Introduction of attribute expiration within items
- Implementation of table-level TTL
Access Optimization Techniques
Two key access optimizations were implemented:
- Dirty checking to prevent unnecessary write operations
- Grouped update requests to reduce write operations
Remarkable Results
The optimization efforts led to impressive improvements:
- 3x reduction in Write Capacity Units usage
- 5x reduction in item size
- 90% decrease in large item updates
- Complete elimination of throttling incidents
These optimizations showcase how proper implementation of AWS best practices and innovative solutions can lead to significant improvements in both performance and cost efficiency.
Learn more about Flo Health’s DynamoDB optimization journey here