Cloud Computing: How Amazon’s DynamoDB helped reinvent databases

June 11, 2015 Off By David

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Behind every great ecommerce website is a database, and in the early 2000s Amazon.com’s database was not keeping up with the company’s business. Part of the problem was that Amazon didn’t have just one database – it relied on a series of them, each with its own responsibility.

As the company headed toward becoming a $10 billion business, the number and size of its SQL databases exploded and managing them became more challenging. By the 2004 holiday shopping rush, outages became more common, caused in large part by overloaded SQL databases. Something needed to change…

But instead of looking for a solution outside the company, Amazon developed its own database management system. It was a whole new kind of database, one that threw out the rules of traditional SQL varieties and was able to scale up and up and up. In 2007 Amazon shared its findings with the world: CTO Werner Vogels and his team released a paper titled “Dynamo – Amazon’s highly available key value store.” Some credit it with being the moment that the NoSQL database market was born…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/2932313/cloud-computing/how-amazon-s-dynamodb-helped-reinvent-databases.html