Dynamo (storage system)

Not to be confused with ATG Dynamo, a J2EE application server

Dynamo is the name given to a set of techniques that when taken together can form a highly available key-value structured storage system or a distributed data store. It has properties of both databases and distributed hash tables (DHTs). Amazon DynamoDB is "built on the principles of Dynamo" (apparently with some improvements) and is a hosted service within the AWS infrastructure. It was created to help address some scalability issues that Amazon.com's website experienced during the holiday season of 2004. By 2007, it was used in Amazon Web Services, such as its Simple Storage Service (S3).

Amazon published the paper on Dynamo, but never released their implementation. The index layer of Amazon S3 implements and extends many of the core features of a Dynamo. Since then, several implementations have been created based on the paper. The paper also inspired many other NoSQL database implementations. Here are some projects that implement it or were inspired by it.

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