It’s been a long time since DynamoDB published a paper. A few days ago, I read its newly published one, “Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service,” and I think it’s one of the most practical papers in recent years for large-scale distributed systems from an engineering perspective. It doesn’t even explain much about the architecture because it doesn’t need to. Shared-nothing systems look similar, and the authors know exactly who the readers of this paper are ^_^. What’s more, the paper is written simply, and there’s no math!
After all, DynamoDB doesn’t need to try to “prove” anything. It has fully proven itself in the past ten years, both in terms of scale and stability. I found that the paper is relatively new, and not too many blogs talk about it, so why don’t I write something about it?