Just posting a link to this paper because I hadn't seen it mentioned here and thought you guys would find it interesting.
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.htm "Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability. ... We submitted the technology for publication in SOSP because many of the techniques used in Dynamo originate in the operating systems and distributed systems research of the past years; DHTs, consistent hashing, versioning, vector clocks, quorum, anti-entropy based recovery, etc. As far as I know Dynamo is the first production system to use the synthesis of all these techniques, and there are quite a few lessons learned from doing so. The paper is mainly about these lessons." -- - kate = masukomi http://weblog.masukomi.org/
