All reads
Research paper

Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store

Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, Werner Vogels

Published
SOSP, 2007
Finished
Finished March 2026
distributed-systemsdatabasesaws
Key takeawayAlways-writable storage by pushing conflict resolution to reads.

Notes

  • Consistent hashing with virtual nodes for partitioning.
  • Sloppy quorums and hinted handoff keep writes available during failures.
  • Vector clocks detect conflicting versions; the application reconciles them.