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Sunday, May 29, 2011

Amazon Dynamo and its design

Here is a seminal paper released by Amazon describing Dynamo, Amazon's proprietary highly available key-value based data store used for it's own data storage needs.

Many philosphies described in this paper coincide with those of other NoSql data stores. For example, consistent hashing for determining which partition to store data, hinted handoffs to ensure read/write operations do not get affected when nodes or parts of network go down temporarily, and so on.  As such, this paper is a great reading material for anyone wanting to understand some of the key design considerations regarding NoSql DBs.