“Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust.”
This was the first line of the highly impactful paper titled “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store.” Published in 2007, it was written at a time when the status quo of database systems was not working for the massive explosion of internet-based applications. A team of computer engineers and scientists at Amazon completely re-thought the idea of data storage in terms of what would be needed for the future, with a firm footing in the computer science of the past.