Papershelf

Jun 14, 2025
DynamoDB: Notes on Operating a Managed NoSQL Service at Scale
I’ve been wanting to re-read the DynamoDB paper for a while now. Not the original Dynamo paper from 2007, but the newer one is from 2022: “Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service”. This paper is fascinating because it shows how the ideas from the original Dynamo evolved into a managed service that handles trillions of API calls during Prime Day. It’s one of those papers that gives you a glimpse into what it really takes to operate distributed systems at massive scale.