Amazon.com Dynamo

This is a paper about Amazon.com's Dynamo service, their distributed key-value store that they use as a back-end to most of their services. Amazon's number one requirement for their data store is that it must always be available for writes, so that they can service every user they have equally. The tradeoff is sometimes uncertain data consistency, which they have decided is a manageable issue. This is pretty much the opposite of the requirements at my job, and I think most people would assume the same about their own data. It's interesting that this is a realistic scenario for them, where one of the fundamental tenets of database behavior is now a secondary requirement.