When working with Amazon DynamoDB on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a common use case is to copy or sync DynamoDB tables in development, testing, or staging environments with the table data that are in the production environment. As a standard practice, each environment uses a different AWS account.
DynamoDB now supports cross-account backup using AWS Backup. For information about associated storage costs when using AWS Backup, see AWS Backup pricing. When you use AWS Backup to copy across accounts, the source and target accounts must be part of an AWS Organizations organization. There are other solutions for cross-account backup and restore using AWS services such as AWS Data Pipeline or AWS Glue. Using those solutions, however, increases the application footprint, because there are more AWS services to deploy and maintain.
You can also use Amazon DynamoDB Streams to capture table changes in the source account. Then you can initiate an AWS Lambda function, and make the corresponding changes in the target table in the target account. But that solution applies to use cases in which source and target tables must always be kept in sync. It might not apply to development, testing, and staging environments where data are updated frequently.
This pattern provides steps to implement a custom solution to copy a Amazon DynamoDB table from one account to another. This pattern can be implemented using common programming languages such as C#, Java, and Python. We recommend using a language that is supported by an AWS SDK.
