> Try to figure out how something like Amazon's systems work and you'll run into a deafening wall of silence.

It looks to me recent history contradicts this point. Amazon is responsible for the Dynamo paper, a mandatory thing to know if you're going to deal with open source NoSQL DBs. All the big players have released how they work internally, giving us Storm and Heron, Luigi, LevelDB, and so many others. Surely you have heard of Kafka ? Coming from a big one as well.

I seriously can't understand where you get this from. The amount of internals that is shared is really interesting.