Amazon’s Dynamo
March 17th, 2009 chrisNow that we’ve spent more than enough time looking over Google’s highly scalable infrastructure, let’s turn our attention to an even newer paper from Amazon. Their datastore, dubbed Dynamo, is an interesting contrast to Google’s work that brings up many interesting questions and points to note from it. Here’s the executive summary:
Dynamo is built to be highly available, and sacrifices the traditional notion of consistency in order to do so.
Yet the paper itself perhaps gives a better one-liner:
Dynamo can be characterized as a zero-hop DHT, where each node maintains enough routing information locally to route a request to the appropriate node directly.