As of a couple years ago, DynamoDB will redistribute throughput between shards based on usage [1], so in theory this should eliminate the hot shard problem. I haven't had a chance to test this in practice, if anybody has hands-on experience I'd love to hear it.

You also finally have a way of identifying hot keys with the terribly named CloudWatch Contributor Insights for DynamoDB. [2]

For exceptional use cases, you also have the option of On-Demand Capacity to pay for what you use and not worry about capacity at all. [3]

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...