AWS DMS for Simple CDC Pipelines
Summary
AWS DMS (Database Migration Service) gets overlooked as a CDC tool because the marketing is all about migrations. For simple change data capture it works well, and it barely needs configuring thanks to native Aurora Postgres support. I reach for something heavier only when the requirements get sharp.
AWS DMS (Database Migration Service) gets overlooked as a CDC tool because the marketing is all about migrations. For simple change data capture, though, it works well, and I keep reaching for it.
A few things make it easy. It has native Aurora Postgres support, so I barely have to configure anything. It's a managed service, which means no infrastructure to babysit and scaling I don't have to think about. It can invoke Lambda directly for each change event, and it handles light transformations during replication. Compared to standing up Debezium and Kafka, the operational overhead is tiny.
The pipeline I usually build looks like this:
Aurora → DMS (CDC mode) → Lambda → Target System
I reach for it on internal tools at moderate scale, when I want something simple and maintainable, and when the team doesn't have much infrastructure support to spare. It's also good for a POC that needs room to grow later.
I skip it when the requirements get sharp: complex event routing or filtering, exactly-once delivery, multi-region distribution, or sub-second latency. Once you need any of those, DMS is the wrong tool and you're back to the heavier setups.