Creating an AWS DynamoDB Table via the AWS Command Line Interface

Hello and welcome back! This week, we’re going to dive into creating a DynamoDB table via the AWS CLI! We’ll learn about permission settings, proper formatting, and creating key pairs from the command line as well.

If you’ve been following my posts, I wrote a previous article in which I used the AWS CLI to spin up an EC2 Instance and do a lot of other fun things. And so this week, we’ll be using similar commands, leveraging the AWS Console lightly, and walking through automating the creation of a DynamoDB table. DynamoDB specifies primary key values, returning items in your table at a very fast rate. It is a fully-managed, serverless database that offers things such as in-memory caching, continuous backups, data imports, etc. If you haven’t realized it by now, I love to automate! So if you’re ready to join me for this project, check out some of the resources required and prerequisites below, and let’s jump into it!

Resources/PreReqs:

• As always, Confidence to get it done
• An AWS Account: Sign Up Here (Free Tier!)
• AWS CLI Installed
• Basic understanding of Linux command input/output
• MacOS Terminal, Windows Command Prompt, or Linux Shell

Part 1

Now, normally I would automate this step as well, but it’s important to also know how to manually create a role in the AWS Console, so to do so, we’ll start by going to the IAM service in the console, and clicking on create role, as shown below:

Next, we’re going to add permissions to the role, by selecting the AWSDynamoDB ReadOnlyAccessPolicy, and giving the Role a Name, which should look like this (You’ll also notice the actual policy details in JSON format as well):