Amazon DynamoDB delivers consistent single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, making it ideal for mission-critical workloads. However, as with any distributed system, a small percentage of requests may experience significantly longer response times than the average. This phenomenon, known as tail latency, refers to these slower outliers that can be seen by looking at metrics such as the 99th or 99.9th percentile of response times. In this post, we explore how Global Payments Inc. (GPN) reduced their tail latency by 30% using request hedging. We review the technical details and challenges they faced, providing insights into how you can optimize your own latency-sensitive applications. In a next post we’ll share detailed implementation examples.