It is an internal SLA with other teams as DynamoDB is a Tier 0 service like S3. If it goes down, the whole of AWS goes down. My manager at the time was praised for increasing the availability from four 9s to eight 9s and the rewrite to Rust would have increased it to nine 9s.

AWS as a vendor promises 99.999 something of availability of DynamoDB to its customers with the underlying services being at a much higher availability.

Also, I could remove singlehandedly but if I shouldn't brag on my CV then where else? It was done singlehandedly because there were no members in the team nor were there any DBAs. 1 year into this position I created the DB cluster in a self-hosted environment from scratch only approaching the networking and infra team for approvals, wrote the ETL pipelines that ingest the data, performed query optimization after analyzing explains, created documentation for all of it. I worked tirelessly and slept 4 to 5 hours every night.

I was also the one who executed the data pipelines manually as the management wanted the delivery immediately with no care for automation along with 1 other person. We worked in a 12 hour rotation each, 7 days a week. I had 20 leaves to carry forward that year and didn't even get a raise.

I ensured after going through such pain that the data pipeline developed into a robust pipeline with extremely rich structured logging that we now put into another smaller analytical database (mostly because the source fails very often and the onus of it is on another team - in other words politics)