Yeah, I think all nosql db's will have that issue if you have extremely unbalanced sharding. This is an application level fault and should be solved there.

But, the thing that is extra bad about dynamo db is how they are paying for 10x higher provisioning as a stop gap, and still getting throttled. That sucks.

FWIW we're using dynamo db and we love it. Pro tip: setup dynamic-dynamodb and let it autoscale for you in realtime. http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/auto-scale-dynamodb-with-dyn...