Streams as the Engine Behind Global Tables

~10 min read

How the same Streams mechanism that powers event-driven Lambda triggers is also what makes Global Tables' replication work.

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Key points

  • Global Tables use DynamoDB Streams internally to propagate writes between participating Regions
  • Enabling Global Tables auto-enables Streams on the table if not already active
  • Streams supports multiple independent consumers — your own Lambda trigger and Global Tables' replication can coexist
  • An outage longer than the 24-hour Streams retention window can force a full resync rather than incremental catch-up