Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
In these cases, switching to Standard-IA can significantly reduce monthly storage costs, especially for archival tables, compliance data, or legacy systems that are still retained but rarely queried.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
DynamoDB tables are billed based on the storage class assigned to the entire table.
- Standard: Higher monthly storage cost, lower read and write throughput prices.
- Standard-IA: Lower storage cost, but higher read and write throughput prices (on-demand requests and provisioned capacity). AWS notes it can reduce total table cost when storage exceeds 50% of the table's throughput cost under Standard.
Tables incur ongoing storage charges regardless of usage, so selecting the wrong storage class can lead to unnecessary cost.
How to detect
5 checks to find it in your estate.
- Identify tables currently set to the Standard storage class
- Review read and write volume over the past 30+ days and compare throughput cost with storage cost
- Determine whether the table is used for active workloads or primarily exists for reference, compliance, or long-term retention
- Assess whether the higher read and write prices are outweighed by the storage savings (performance is the same in both classes)
- Validate with data owners or service teams before changing the storage class
How to fix
How to remove the waste.
If the table is rarely read and doesn't serve an active production workload, consider switching it to Standard-IA. Start by confirming that the higher read and write prices won't outweigh the storage savings; performance, durability and availability are the same as Standard. Then update the table's storage class using the AWS Console, CLI, or SDK. This change can be made without downtime or data migration, but a table allows no more than two table class updates in a trailing 30-day period, so plan changes rather than switching back and forth. To prevent recurrence, review provisioning defaults in infrastructure-as-code templates or automation scripts to ensure archival or infrequently accessed tables default to Standard-IA when appropriate. Periodically audit storage class assignments across environments to identify tables that may no longer require high-frequency access.
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.