Episode #56: Accelerating DynamoDB Workflows using Dynobase with Rafal Wilinski

About Rafal Wilinski
Rafal Wilinski is the founder of Dynobase, a professional GUI Client for DynamoDB with mission to onboard thousands of developers to Cloud-native and Serverless world. In addition to founding Dynobase, Rafal distributes a weekly newsletter “This Week in DynamoDB” and is a Serverless Engineer at Stedi. Prior to his current roles, Rafal got his start in developing mobile games, and is a cloud native engineer, AWS certified architect, and Serverless Framework contributor and maintainer.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/41YJAflfnP4

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi everyone! I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Rafal Wilinski. Hey Rafal, thanks for joining me.

Rafal: Hi, thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So you are the creator of Dynobase and an independent AWS consultant. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what Dynobase is all about?

Rafal: Yeah, sure. As you mentioned, I'm founder of Dynobase, professional graphical interface for DynamoDB, and also right now an independent AWS consultant, mostly focusing on serverless solutions. I'm deeply passionate about AWS and mostly serverless, since, I think, 2016, because I attended the first Serverless Conf back in London, and that's why I became so excited about this whole field. I'm running my own blog which is called Servicefull, because we had so many discussions about what serverless is and how bad a name that is for a paradigm of technology.

So I decided to actually steal the term coined by Patrick Debois, which is Servicefull, because full of services. I'm writing about serverless, about cloud, and I recently merged that with my own page, but you can still go there. It's going to redirect you. Before going all in into AWS, I was actually making mobile games. I've made a few of them, one of them became even quite popular, which was called Voxel Rush. But my parents were saying that making mobile games isn't a real job, so that's why I transitioned into making web and cloud, and now I'm here. Less than a year ago, I started Dynobase, which was trying to solve my problems with UX and UI with DynamoDB, but I guess we'll talk about it a little bit later.

Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And actually, that's why I want to talk to you about today is Dynobase. So you and I have been communicating for quite some time. You know I'm a huge fan of DynamoDB. I love just the scale of it. I love what you can do with it. Rick Houlihan opened up, I think, everyone's mind or minds with what you can do in regards to relational structures in there and how you can access data in different ways in the single table design stuff, which is quite fascinating. But I really want to get into Dynobase, what it does, what's the purpose of it, but maybe we just start at the beginning. Why did you create Dynobase?

Rafal: Yeah, sure. Actually, there is sort of I think quite interesting story behind it because it all started more than a year ago when I was working at X-Team. I was working on kind of quite a big project for the educational space. I was working as AWS DevOps engineer, I was setting up infrastructures, it was all set up on containers. But we received a new requirement to create a fully real time community platform. Our architects, Raynard, which is a great friend and also an engineer, approached me and said that, "Hey, I know that you're super interested in serverless. I know that you've contributed some pieces to serverless framework, and you write about it. So maybe we can try evaluating all those new tools that AWS released, like AppSync, Amplify, DynamoDB, and try to create something on top of that."

And that sounded super good because I could finally use serverless technologies at my day job. So we immediately rushed into evaluating those tools. We watched a lot of random session including Rick Houlihan about single table design and it was mind blowing and charming at the same time. But when we were evaluating those tools, we realized that if you would like to use AppSync, we probably have to use Amplify and if we go with Amplify, we can't go with single table design, because if you're using Amplify, you're creating graphical schema, which is then translated to separate DynamoDB tables, which is not working with single table design super good. So we decided to use serverless framework DynamoDB single table design to create everything. And we rushed into the implementation without having thought all about testing processes, about debugging because we decided to learn as we go because we had that opportunity.

And when we started implementation, obviously, there was a lot of bugs and there was a lot of mistakes. We had our single table design schema, designed very good, but it was a new field for us. So we obviously committed a lot of beginner mistakes. While we were doing that, we started checking a lot of data, a lot of records inside DynamoDB just in console, because we needed to check if that specific record was inserted correctly if the data that it's inside database is actually good, or we wanted to modify some records manually. And while I was doing that, I realized that I'm spending definitely too much time switching between browsers, between regions, between AWS accounts, because, for instance, you can't have open two separate AWS regions, two separate AWS consoles for two regions in one browser. It was actually a pain. The same for regions. So you had to actually kind of hack your browser. You had to have opened many browsers and it was just super messy. There was no bookmarks. There was no history. Scanning speed was quite bad.

So I decided, I'm an engineer, I don't like wasting my time fighting with software. I like automation, I like solving stuff. So I decided to hack something really quickly using React and Electron, like a tool which is going to allow me just query in a little bit easier fashion, and it's going to be easier. Yeah. And I've asked a few of my friends who are also working with DynamoDB, which are engineers, if they are sharing the same pains as I am, and it appeared that a lot of people actually have the same problem of DynamoDB, that the DynamoDB itself is super good. It's super powerful database. It's enabled things that you could never imagine before. But the way that you access it, the way you modify records directly when you debug it, it's not super good, especially if you're working with the local version of DynamoDB. You can't easily access what's inside.

And while I had that confirmation that it's not only my own problem because I initially wanted to open source the solution. I felt that, hey, I was working in open source space for the past five or even more years, I've committed so many lines of code, I've committed so many things to serverless framework and to other tools, and I haven't received any money for it. It was greedy approach, but, you know. So, I decided actually to turn it into a product and try creating a business of it because it seemed that many people would pay for solving their problem. And when I realized that it can actually work. I had this moment of big excitement and I gained a lot of power just to work tirelessly, even after my day job, just to finish this UI. I think I did the first prototype in a month.

It took me something like 100 hours. I was about to release it. I announced on Twitter to...