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7/21/2026
Day 1/30 AWS System Design Patterns

Day 1/30 AWS System Design Patterns

Short summary

A gaming platform's DynamoDB table throttles on leaderboard reads despite having 10,000 RCUs of headroom. The root cause is a hot partition: battle-royale accounts for 78% of read traffic concentrated on one partition key, and per-partition throughput limits apply regardless of total table provisioning. The correct answer is C — increasing provisioned capacity won't help when a single partition is saturated.

  • •DynamoDB per-partition throughput limits apply regardless of total table RCU provisioning
  • •A hot partition (78% of traffic on one key) causes throttling even with table-level headroom
  • •CloudWatch reports consumed RCUs as a table aggregate, masking per-partition saturation

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