When taking into speed of development and cost efficiency, do you start building your database with RDS or DynamoDB?
I'm leaning towards RDS because the data structure is more familiar, while structuring your queries and data for DynamoDB seems a bit awkward.
However DynamoDB looks like it'll help me develop a lot faster, since with RDS I would have to create my VPC and basically build a basic network infrastructure before I even get into actual development.
What are your thoughts?
TL;DR they're not choices, you need both. The right tool for the job and costs come into consideration.
DynamoDB is great for bursty short lived data like session data or auctions for example where bids are happening quickly.
After the auction however storing persistent static data about the results in Dynamo is both not using the technology effectively (data is static) and going to cost you a new mortgage compared to Aurora (serverless RDS) or something best suited for static and persistent data.
At small scale, less than a few trillion rows per table, a InnoDB table will perform comparible to DynamoDB with good indexes and smart queries but start slowing down and for 10x the size of InnoDB you can use MyISAM and outperform DynamoDB without any special effort. Both are supported by RDS