Dynamo

This paper describes Dynamo, Amazon's highly available Key-value store.
As the title says, Dynamo is a simple key-value store, runs on large number of servers, takes failure into account as a normal event, and makes trade-off for availability.
As we've seen so far, lots of traditional data store don't work well in super-large configuration. GFS and BigTable represents google's response to the issue, and Dynamo is Amazon's.
The most interesting point is that they weight write over read - usually the opposite is the case.
This is due to how Amazon's main application - e-commerce - works.
Another interesting point is emphasis on SLA and its representation - 99.9%.
Dynamo is highly engineered toward meeting Amazon's needs.
Even though Dynamo let users choose some trade-off, but there are already a lot of assumption regarding workload characteristic. (Of course, this is the case with GFS and BigTable)
I guess that it is time for another general solution to come. (SCADS?)