The concepts are definitely applicable. You'll need to do some small work to translate vocabulary and work around a slightly different feature set, but most of it should work for you.
And yep, Cassandra is pretty similar to DynamoDB. Both are wide-column data stores. Some of the original folks that worked on Dynamo (not DynamoDB) at Amazon.com went to Facebook and worked on Cassandra. The concepts underlying Dynamo because the basis for DynamoDB at AWS.
If you take Cassandra and remove the power user features whose runtime cost is hard to predict, what you're left with is pretty close to DynamoDB. It's harder to use and incompatible with everything else, but its key feature is not overpromising capacity. We're only considering alternatives because there's no cost saving story around tiered storage.
And yep, Cassandra is pretty similar to DynamoDB. Both are wide-column data stores. Some of the original folks that worked on Dynamo (not DynamoDB) at Amazon.com went to Facebook and worked on Cassandra. The concepts underlying Dynamo because the basis for DynamoDB at AWS.
For more background on Dynamo, check out The Dynamo Paper: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sos...