Exonic Builds Reusable Serverless Chat Platform Using DynamoDB Single Table Design

Exonic developed Peanut Gallery, a reusable chat infrastructure designed to be embedded into any application, eliminating the need for each team to build its own solution. The backend uses AWS API Gateway WebSockets for real-time messaging, with a DynamoDB single-table design storing four entities — rooms, messages, memberships, and read receipts — under one composite key structure. This approach keeps all room data in a single partition, allowing full room state retrieval with one query and user room lists via a Global Secondary Index. A Lambda authorizer validates JWT tokens to secure WebSocket connections, while stale connections are cleaned up using TTLs and 410 Gone response handling. The frontend is packaged as a Svelte 5 component library published to npm under the @exonic-za scope, allowing applications to integrate chat as a simple dependency.