Trigger a notification when a new record is created in DynamoDB using Node JS

Question

I have seen many examples where people have used Lambda and SNS to send notification to user if anything new is added to the DynamoDB table..but how can this be done using NodeJS. Requesting for some insightful resources.

Answer 1

I think what you're looking for is called DynamoDB Streams. You can dig deep into the documentation for better understanding. The primary idea here is to create something known as a stream on a particular table and attach a Lambda trigger to it.

You can write the Lambda code in javascript and deploy it on a NodeJS environment in AWS Lambda Service. This way whenever there is a new record or update in a particular record in your table, the stream will automatically inject the whole record as a JSON object into your lambda, which you can then process and leverage SNS for sending out a notification.

Tutorial:

Tutorial: Process new items with DynamoDB Streams and Lambda

Using NodeJS hosted on your server:

If you wish to skip AWS Lambda and use pure NodeJS hosted on your server, you could probably make use of SQS queues. So instead of having the Lambda trigger directly sending out the notifications, you can just add them to a notification queue. You can consume this queue using AWS SDK for JavaScript v3 (i.e AWS.SQS()) and then you can send a notifications using AWS.SNS() from your NodeJS server.

Advanced approach:

If you're advanced level developer, then you could even use the DynamoDB Streams Kinesis adapter to process stream records with the API calls. I've personally never used this approach, but attaching a link here for your reference.

References:

• Working with streams
• Working with DynamoDB Streams
• DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda triggers