The next meeting will be on 09/08 at 7:30 at the Comcast Center (as
usual) and the topic will be Amazon's Dynamo (http://nosqlsummer.org/
paper/amazon-dynamo). It should be a great discussion and I hope to
see you there!

Blurb from the site on Dynamo:

Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face
at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world;
even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and
impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides
services for many web sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an
infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components
located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and
large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is
managed in the face of these failures drives the reliability and
scalability of the software systems.

This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly
available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services
use to provide an “always-on” experience. To achieve this level of
availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure
scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-
assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel
interface for developers to use.

Yours,
Trevor