All Things Distributed

OCTOBER 2, 2007

In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. 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.

Operating System 83

Operating System Storage Scalability Technology 83

The Agile Manager

OCTOBER 28, 2007

In recent years, Michael Milken has turned his attention to health and medicine. Earlier this year, the Milken Institute released a report concluding that 7 chronic illnesses – diabetes, hypertension, cancer, etc. – are responsible for over $1 trillion in annual productivity losses in the United States. They go on to report that 70% of the cases of these 7 chronic illnesses are preventable through lifestyle change: diet, exercise, avoiding cigarettes and what not. 1 In a recent interview on Bloo

Government 40

Government Retail Energy Code 40

All Things Distributed

OCTOBER 23, 2007

If we would just forget about discriminatory traffic management (e.g. based on deep packet inspection) life on the network would be pretty simple, even under overload conditions. A lot has been written about this already but Wes really nails it in his summary.

Traffic 60

Traffic Network 60

All Things Distributed

OCTOBER 9, 2007

The 2007 Nobel prize in Physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for independently discovering Giant Magnetoresistance in 1988. Their work had a tremendous impact on the computer industry as it revolutionized the way we could store and retrieve information on hard disks. It was the first major application of nanotechnology and allowed hard disks to shrink from the size of a large washing machine to the device that fits in an mp3 player.

60

60

All Things Distributed

OCTOBER 6, 2007

The Institutional Yes is a Harvard Business Review interview with Jeff Bezos about the way strategies are developed at Amazon. I have written before about how the relentless customer focus translates into driving architecture and design using the “working backwards” approach. The interview with Jeff gives you more insight on the impact of customer focus on overall strategy and how it drives a culture of experimentation.

Strategy 60

Strategy Architecture Design Development 60

All Things Distributed

OCTOBER 3, 2007

There is a lot of positive feedback about the Dynamo paper but I noticed that something I wrote in introducing the paper is being misunderstood. This was my fault, I wrote it too strongly. What I meant by internal-only is that Dynamo is not directly exposed externally. However, Dynamo and similar Amazon technologies are used to power parts of our Amazon Web Services, such as S3.

Technology 60

Technology Technology 60

All Things Distributed

OCTOBER 1, 2007

My old friend Steve Vinoski is back online. Steve was with Iona for many, many years, working as the main architect on many of their Middleware technologies. Steve left Iona this spring to work for a start-up in the Boston area. But Steve became really famous for this drawing, which he used to express his opinion about my keynote at Middleware 2004.

Technology 60

Technology Technology 60