--- title: Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8 Million Ledger Mistake? description: Uber's LedgerStore, built on DynamoDB in 2017, is widely cited as a system design success story — but it was actually abandoned within 2-3 years due to... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/nobody-got-fired-for-uber-s-8-million-ledger-mistake--echuhzllt twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8 Million Ledger Mistake? | daily.dev og:description: Uber's LedgerStore, built on DynamoDB in 2017, is widely cited as a system design success story — but it was actually abandoned within 2-3 years due to... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/nobody-got-fired-for-uber-s-8-million-ledger-mistake--echuhzllt og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/echUhzLlt.png og:image:alt: Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8 Million Ledger Mistake? og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8 Million Ledger Mistake? **[The PayEng Playbook](https://daily.dev/sources/alvaroduran)** · 10 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Uber's LedgerStore, built on DynamoDB in 2017, is widely cited as a system design success story — but it was actually abandoned within 2-3 years due to prohibitive costs. With 11 million daily trips generating hundreds of millions of writes, the consumption-based pricing of DynamoDB led to an estimated $8 million bill. The post argues this was a foreseeable failure driven by bad incentives: engineers optimizing for promotions rather than sound economics. The migration to an internal DocStore-based system required building additional tooling (CDC streaming framework 'Flux'), compounding the waste. The author criticizes both Uber for presenting this at AWS re:Invent 2019 as a case study, and publications like ByteByteGo for continuing to praise it without examining the full cost picture. The core lesson: technical requirements alone are insufficient — cost modeling must be part of system design decisions. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How Uber Serves over 150 Million Reads per Second from Integrated Cache](https://daily.dev/posts/how-uber-serves-over-150-million-reads-per-second-from-integrated-cache-mjlsygxjr) · ByteByteGo · 218 upvotes · 5 comments - [A Response to the Viral "Leaving AWS" Hacker News Post](https://daily.dev/posts/a-response-to-the-viral-leaving-aws-hacker-news-post-94ls3q1sn) · AWS Fundamentals · 33 upvotes · 7 comments - [30\+ Updates per Second per Account: Uber Scales Ledger Processing with Batching](https://daily.dev/posts/30-updates-per-second-per-account-uber-scales-ledger-processing-with-batching-h5w2zvquh) · InfoQ · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#fintech](https://daily.dev/tags/fintech), [#aws-dynamodb](https://daily.dev/tags/aws-dynamodb) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/nobody-got-fired-for-uber-s-8-million-ledger-mistake--echuhzllt) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8 Million Ledger Mistake?","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/nobody-got-fired-for-uber-s-8-million-ledger-mistake--echuhzllt","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/nobody-got-fired-for-uber-s-8-million-ledger-mistake--echuhzllt"},"datePublished":"2026-04-20T13:19:13.728Z","dateModified":"2026-04-20T13:24:11.942Z","description":"Uber's LedgerStore, built on DynamoDB in 2017, is widely cited as a system design success story — but it was actually abandoned within 2-3 years due to...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/1df958285f4cd2c59343dfe53ef158f6?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/1df958285f4cd2c59343dfe53ef158f6?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"The PayEng Playbook","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The PayEng Playbook","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--F741aE6c--/f_auto/v1733559638/logos/alvaroduran","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/alvaroduran"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/nobody-got-fired-for-uber-s-8-million-ledger-mistake--echuhzllt","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"career,fintech,aws-dynamodb","timeRequired":"PT10M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The PayEng Playbook","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/alvaroduran"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8 Million Ledger Mistake?"}]} ```