Managing dev/staging/production on DynamoDB?

Question

We're starting to use DynamoDB, and want separate environments for dev/staging/production. We can't figure out a natural way to do this---do we just create separate AWS accounts? Or do we use the same account, but add silly prefixes to our tables ("dev-products", "staging-products", "prod-products")?

Answer 1

The standard way to manage this with any amazon products is to create separate accounts and then use consolidated billing so that it doesn't complicate the billing aspect. The thing i like about this is that you don't risk breaking the production code by accidentally running the wrong command. Obviously it doesn't help you if you're logged into the wrong instance but it still helps quite a bit.

Other uses for multiple accounts could be to manage permissions and better testing. Having the accounts separate helps testing because you can reproduce the production account 100% and turn it on and off when you need to test new features. I've talked with amazon premium support about this issue and they've said that this seems to be standard practice for the larger companies. Some of the larger companies have many accounts. At my work here we just have 3 and I find it more useful every day.

Answer 2

Don't forget Amazon's greatly enhanced IAM for access control. It largely gives you the same benefits of separate accounts. (Separate accounts are still an option if you have want to have different levels of paid support.)

Naming wise, my preference is name.environment.whatever.