Amazon DynamoDB almost never goes offline, and that reliability is precisely what makes it dangerous. Teams stop planning for it to fail. So when a problem arises, such as throttling during a traffic spike, the application meets a condition nobody designed for.

AWS documents sixteen distinct throttling reasons in its throttling resolution guide, and each one reaches your customers the same way: as a request that failed. The damage usually follows a predictable sequence:

1. An uneven access pattern pushes one partition past its throughput limit while the table's overall metrics still look healthy.
2. DynamoDB returns throttling exceptions, which your SDK retries automatically.
3. Without proper backoff and jitter, those retries keep the partition saturated and extend the event well past its natural end.
4. Requests pile up behind SDK timeouts that were never tuned, and the failure spreads to services that never even touched DynamoDB.

Gremlin lets you rehearse that sequence safely, from your side of the connection, without touching the table. Latency experiments recreate the delay a throttled request experiences. Blackhole experiments remove the endpoint entirely so you can confirm your application degrades instead of collapsing. Gremlin helps you turn these results into actionable insights that you can use to build services that can handle even the most unexpected DynamoDB failure modes.