New ScyllaDB Release Is a DynamoDB Alternative That Scales Faster and Costs 50% Less

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — ScyllaDB today announced the general availability of ScyllaDB X Cloud, a truly elastic database that helps teams achieve predictable performance at scale – without overprovisioning. Database capacity can be increased rapidly and precisely when required, then scaled back as soon as the surge subsides. For example, ScyllaDB can scale from 100K to 2M operations per second in just minutes, with consistent single–digit millisecond P99 latency even during scaling, backup, and failure recovery. As a result, teams don’t need to wastefully overprepare for potential peaks or suffer suboptimal performance due to traditional scaling lag.

The new release extends elastic scaling to use cases that involve advanced ScyllaDB capabilities such as Change Data Capture, Materialized Views, and Secondary Indexes. Most notably, it extends this capability to ScyllaDB’s DynamoDB–compatible API (Alternator). Although ScyllaDB was created as an Apache Cassandra alternative, it has become increasingly popular as a DynamoDB alternative over the past two years. Teams have been migrating from DynamoDB to ScyllaDB to reduce costs, support multicloud or cloud migration initiatives, and avoid DynamoDB technical limitations such as item size limits. Now, teams can also increase/reduce capacity faster than DynamoDB.

Additionally, ScyllaDB now guarantees that ScyllaDB X Cloud costs are 50% of DynamoDB costs (or less). ScyllaDB’s inherent efficiency comes from a close–to–the–metal design, features such as dictionary–based compression and file–based streaming, and ongoing performance optimizations.

According to Todd Coleman, chief architect and technical co–founder at Yieldmo, “ScyllaDB supported cross–cloud deployments, required a manageable number of servers, and offered competitive costs. Best of all, its API was DynamoDB–compatible, meaning we could migrate with minimal code changes. In fact, a single engineer implemented the necessary modifications in just a few days.”

Prem Kumar Patturaj, senior engineering manager at Freshworks, shared, “DynamoDB’s item size limitation forced multiple steps: we had to split the data into multiple records, write it, and then fetch it again. All of this logic ended up adding compute overhead. So, we migrated to ScyllaDB because these limitations don’t exist there.”

About ScyllaDB X Cloud
ScyllaDB X Cloud is the next generation of ScyllaDB’s fully–managed database–as–a–service. It is a truly elastic database designed to support even variable/unpredictable workloads with consistent low latency as well as low costs.

ScyllaDB divides the database into small, fixed–size fragments called tablets, each ~5 GB. Each tablet is fully independent and can serve queries on its own. As soon as the first tablet moves to a new server, that server can begin offloading traffic from existing nodes. In practice, this happens about ten seconds after the server joins the cluster.

Key ScyllaDB X Cloud features include:

• Higher storage utilization: Since servers can be brought online and start serving traffic fast, clusters can run at around 90% storage utilization (compared to the more typical 70%). This reduces the number of servers required and lowers infrastructure costs.
• Storage autoscaling: Users define the minimum CPU footprint for the cluster, and ScyllaDB automatically scales storage capacity to match.
• Mixed node sizes: The combination of shard–per–core execution and tablets allows clusters to mix very large nodes (for example, 128 cores) with small ones (as few as 2 cores). This enables high utilization, simpler operations, and more granular scaling.
• Advanced compression: Up to 80% better compression reduces both storage usage and network transfer volume.
• Faster data streaming: Data streaming can be up to 25X faster while sending nearly 3X less data across the network.
• AWS I8g and I8ge performance gains: On ScyllaDB, moving to ARM Graviton4–powered I8g or I8ge instances delivers up to 2X throughput at the same price, along with higher usable storage from improved compression and utilization.

About ScyllaDB

ScyllaDB is a specialty database for workloads that require predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted by organizations that require ultra–low latency, even at millions of features or operations per second, billions of embeddings, or petabytes of storage. ScyllaDB’s shard–per–core architecture taps the full power of modern infrastructure, translating to fewer nodes, less admin, and lower costs. Over 400 companies such as Disney+, Discord, Tripadvisor, Expedia, Zillow, Starbucks, and Comcast use ScyllaDB for their toughest database challenges. For more information: https://www.scylladb.com/ 

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