AWS is announcing the general availability of vector search in Amazon DynamoDB—enabling customers to store vector embeddings alongside operational data in DynamoDB and run similarity searches directly against that data, without replicating it to a separate vector store.
According to AWS, DynamoDB supports native vector search with single-digit millisecond latency, and is designed for any scale, even trillions of vectors. There are no servers to provision, patch, or manage, and no software to install, maintain, or operate. The service has no versions, no maintenance windows, and zero downtime maintenance.
Vector indexes have no storage limits and scale horizontally as data grows. Users can now build applications that require semantic retrieval on agentic memory, retrieval augmented generation, recommendation engines, personalized experiences, anomaly detection, and more using DynamoDB and its native vector search.
If your application already uses DynamoDB, adding vector search previously required copying data into a dedicated vector database while maintaining a synchronization pipeline between the two services. This added operational overhead, data movement costs, licensing costs, and the challenge of maintaining predictable low latency at scale. With vector search built into DynamoDB, vectors and operational data share the same serverless infrastructure and the same pay-per-request pricing model, said the company.
Additionally, vector search in DynamoDB also introduces a new index type that you create on an attribute storing vector embeddings. You generate embeddings using a model of your choice, such as Amazon Bedrock Titan Text Embeddings, Cohere Embed, or OpenAI text embedding models, and store them as a list of floats in your table using a standard PutItem call.
DynamoDB is fully serverless, so vector search scales automatically with no infrastructure to manage. It supports up to 4096 dimensions, Euclidean, Cosine, and Dot product distance functions, and inline filtering, said AWS.
Vector search in Amazon DynamoDB is generally available now in all commercial AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region. For pricing details, visit the Amazon DynamoDB pricing page.
For more information about this news, visit https://aws.amazon.com.