DynamoDB Is Throttling but Capacity Looks Idle. Crank It Up?
DynamoDB throttles some requests while table capacity looks underused. A teammate wants to raise capacity or flip to on-demand. Defend the real cause.
the decision you defend
DynamoDB is returning throttling errors on certain requests, yet the table-level consumed capacity is far below what is provisioned. A teammate says just raise the capacity or switch to on-demand. What is really happening, and what do you do?
the situation
A subset of requests to a DynamoDB table return throttling errors during busy periods. When you open the table metrics, the consumed capacity sits well under the provisioned amount, so on paper the table is barely working.
context
The table partitions on a key with only a handful of distinct values, and one of those values gets the overwhelming majority of traffic. The team provisions capacity generously. A teammate sees the throttling next to low average utilization and wants to either double the provisioned capacity or switch the table to on-demand to make it scale on its own.
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 5 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.