Great paper on Amazon's Dynamo distributed storage system
I just read this great paper describing the architecture and implementation details of Amazon’s Dynamo system, the distributed fault-tolerant storage architecture that drives Amazon’s computing system. The paper’s author, Dr. Werner Vogels, is Amazon’s CTO and thus is clearly an excellent authority on the subject.
Some of the details which appeal to me are the surprising (to me) design tradeoffs they made. Rather than accept the poor availability and high consistency of relational databases, they opted for a highly asynchronous, fault-tolerant ‘eventually consistent’ architecture, abstracted at the high level as a key/value container. The paper has much more detail, and it makes for a very interesting peek behind the scenes at one of the world’s largest distributed computing systems.
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