A company is developing a weather forecast application that displays forecasts for cities within a...

Amazon DynamoDB performance depends heavily on partition key design. AWS documentation warns against access patterns that repeatedly target the same partition key, as this causes hot partitions, even in on-demand mode.

In this scenario, most reads focus on the current day’s forecast for a small number of large cities. Using CityId alone as the partition key would cause hot partitions for those cities. Adding a calculated suffix (such as a hash or modulo value) to CityId spreads read requests across multiple partitions while still allowing efficient querying.

Using ForecastDate as the partition key (Options C and D) would concentrate traffic on a single value (today’s date), creating severe hot partition issues. Option B lacks a meaningful access pattern and complicates queries.

AWS documentation explicitly recommends key-suffix techniques for workloads with skewed access patterns to distribute traffic evenly. Therefore, using CityId with a calculated suffix as the partition key is the correct design.