Dynamo, Highly Available Key-value Store from Amazon

This week I went to the geekSessions meetup which was titled 'Designing Beyond the Database'. It was fairly interesting to hear from real companies about the limitations of Relational Databases (for them) and how they've all moved to implementing their own hash to disk mechanisms. Hadoop was mentioned regularly.

I've had a rough idea on how Amazons S3 works, but Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon.. very cool guy imho) talks about a paper they will be releasing about Amazon Dynamo:

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

"..Amazon has developed a number of storage technologies, of which the Amazon Simple Storage Service (also available outside of Amazon and known as Amazon S3), is probably the best known. This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, another highly available and scalable distributed data store built for Amazon’s platform. Dynamo is used to manage the state of services that have very high reliability requirements and need tight control over the tradeoffs between availability, consistency, cost-effectiveness and performance."

Some nice reading if your into this stuff! :)