---
title: "Introduction"
sidebar_position: 10
---

The `carts` component of our architecture uses Amazon DynamoDB as its storage backend, which is a common use-case you'll find for non-relational databases integration with Amazon EKS. The way in which the carts API is currently deployed uses a [lightweight version of Amazon DynamoDB](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DynamoDBLocal.html) running as a container in the EKS cluster.

You can see this by running the following command:

```bash
$ kubectl -n carts get pod 
NAME                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS        AGE
carts-5d7fc9d8f-xm4hs             1/1     Running   0               14m
carts-dynamodb-698674dcc6-hw2bg   1/1     Running   0               14m
```

In the case above, the Pod `carts-dynamodb-698674dcc6-hw2bg` is our lightweight DynamoDB service. We can verify our `carts` application is using this by inspecting its environment:

```bash
$ kubectl -n carts exec deployment/carts -- env | grep CARTS_DYNAMODB_ENDPOINT
CARTS_DYNAMODB_ENDPOINT=http://carts-dynamodb:8000
```

This approach can be useful for testing, but we want to migrate our application to use the fully managed Amazon DynamoDB service in order to take full advantage of the scale and reliability it offers.