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Distributed Systems

Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store

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Added January 10, 2025

Summary

Amazon's Dynamo paper presents a highly available and scalable distributed key-value store that sacrifices strong consistency for availability. It introduces concepts like consistent hashing, vector clocks, and quorum-based replication to achieve partition tolerance and availability in distributed systems.

💡 Key Takeaway

Understanding the trade-offs between consistency and availability is crucial for distributed systems. Dynamo demonstrates that eventual consistency can be an acceptable trade-off when availability is paramount, especially for systems like shopping carts where temporary inconsistency is tolerable.