Amazon’s Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system

Werner Vogels writes about Amazon’s Dynamo,

[tease]

Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system.

The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability.

[tease]

Dynamo is a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience.

To achieve this level of availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel interface for developers to use.

[via Henri Altarac]