Disclaimer: This article is neither about dynamo, nor about museums, and has absolutely nothing to do with the Houston Dynamo FC. Over the past 20 years, DynamoDB has gradually become the cornerstone of Amazon's internal services. Whenever there's a need for a database, everyone thinks of using DynamoDB. Why is that? What exactly makes it so good?

In the very first lecture of MIT's 6.824 Distributed Systems course, Morris emphasizes that unless absolutely necessary, one should never consider making a system distributed, as it complicates many things. However, with increasing demands for data volume, availability, and scalability, distributed systems seem to become the only solution. That brings along numerous challenges: many tasks that are simple on a single machine suddenly become problematic when multiple machines have to collaborate together. Database systems, especially OLTP, are full of these problems because they have zero tolerance for "errors".