Amazon
Amazon originally built standardized infrastructure to run its own retail business more efficiently; that internal infrastructure, including services like S3 and EC2, became the foundation of AWS.
What we cover in the quiz
- Amazon's Dynamo paper described a highly available key-value store built for its own retail operations, and its ideas around eventual consistency directly influenced later databases such as Cassandra and Riak.
- Amazon built standardized internal infrastructure to run its own retail business more efficiently, then realized other companies would pay to use the same building blocks, which became Amazon Web Services.
- Aurora decouples the database engine from storage, pushing redo log processing down into a distributed, multi-replica storage service. That is what lets it offer MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility with much faster failover and recovery.