DynamoDB RCUs and WCUs

• When you create a new provisioned table in Amazon DynamoDB, you must specify its provisioned throughput capacity.

  • This is the amount of read and write activity that the table can support.

  • DynamoDB uses this information to reserve sufficient system resources to meet your throughput requirements.

Read Capacity Units (RCUs)

• A read capacity unit represents one strongly consistent read per second, or two eventually consistent reads per second, for an item up to 4 KB in size.

• For example, you create a table with 10 provisioned read capacity units.

  • This allows you to perform 10 strongly consistent reads per second, or 20 eventually consistent reads per second, for items up to 4 KB.

Write Capacity Units (WCUs)

• A write capacity unit represents one write per second, for an item up to 1 KB in size.

• For example, you create a table with 10 write capacity units.

  • This allows you to perform 10 writes per second, for items up to 1 KB in size per second.