Comment by KirinDave

That's fantastic, but let's just take a look at the documentation a few years ago when I discovered this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130102210613/http://docs.aws.a...

Huh, worded slightly differently, isn't it? They DO allude to this perhaps being the case in https://web.archive.org/web/20121221003912/http://docs.aws.a... but it's not made clear at any point that scans will yield up keys neatly bundled by shard.

It is not the case even now that the scan operation is using your capacity to cause this, it's because of the way shards enumerate their keys and that is not done simultaneously and mixed for you before sending it. You can redirect write traffic to another table and still often exhibit a rate limit effect even though the scan isn't consuming writes for that table.

That, I think, is still quite surprising.

You can take for granted how great the docs are now, although I still submit that this aspect of the system is quite poorly documented. AWS in general is fantastic at conveying API endpoints and very poor at offering a new developer a narrative on how to use the product.

The reason that the docs are as good as they are now: people like me have been around yelling at Amazon for years to improve their documentation, and telling tech reps to better document things. I hope you in your capacity do the same. And I will continue to offer insights like this on forums like this precisely because there are lots of relatively new platform engineers here. It's one of the few things I _like_ doing on hacker news.