Chris Hickman and Jon Christensen of Kelsus and Rich Staats from Secret Stache offer a history lesson on the unique challenges of data at “Internet scale” that gave birth to NoSQL and DynamoDB. How did AWS get to where it is with DynamoDB? And, what is AWS doing now?

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Werner’s Worst day at Amazon: Database system crashes during Super Saver Shipping
Amazon strives to prevent problems that it knows will happen again by realizing relational database management systems aren’t built/designed for the Internet/Cloud
Internet: Scale up vs. scale out via databases or servers; statefulness of databases prevents easy scalability
Need sharding and partitioning of data to have clusters that can be scaled up individually
Amazon’s Aha Moment: Realization that 90% of data accessed was simplistic, rather than relational; same thing happened at Microsoft - recall the Internet Tidal Wave memo?
Challenge of building applications using CGI bin when Internet was brand new
Solution: Build your own Internet database; optimize for scalability

Links

AWS

re:Invent

DynamoDB

NoSQL

AWS re:Invent 2018 - Keynote with Andy Jassy

AWS re:Invent 2018 - Keynote with Werner Vogels

Oracle Database

Bill Gates’ Internet Tidal Wave

CGI Bin

Kelsus

Secret Stache Media