Amazon's Dynamo
Okay, Amazon has just published an interesting paper about how they manage state for some of their services. The underlying idea is a hash table, distributed, reliable, versioned and simple. They have some interesting constraints that influenced the design of the system, and it is an interesting, if dry, read.
Dare has some comments about it.
I'll limit myself to saying that the data versioning approach is extremely interesting. The idea is that you issue a get(key) and the result is a set of relevant objects that may need reconciliation. They end with a conclusion that while this may seem like putting a lot of the responsibility in the app developers hands, this is something that they already had to deal with due to the scalability requirements that they face.
I wouldn't want to do this for a small site, but I can see the advantages for scaling wide.
Amusingly enough, the classic shopping cart sample appears to be a core service for this system, and a complex one.
Comments
Thanks for the link. Caught my eve because of the last word you wrote - simple.
For me - that's core. Simple = reliable = maintainable.
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