These are both extremely minor enhancements for using dynamodb. One is just for launching the local instance, to be able to specify port seems like a pretty basic option you would want. And the other is if region name is not null but is an empty string, it won't use endpoint (it just checks for null in the calling code of this Region, but it really shouldn't try to convert empty strings). For example, we configure with spring YAML, and there's no way to unset a property but you can set it to an empty string which seems like it should be sufficient to ignore "region."