While not exactly the same, the Dynamo paper outlines that a single host is composed of many virtual nodes. It is very likely that a physical DynamoDB host will have dozens of nodes. This is done so that the cluster can scale up or down independent of the number of hosts while avoiding a gross imbalance. (12 nodes on 11 hosts means one host has 100% more traffic. 34 nodes on 11 hosts means one host has 33% more traffic.)

It is important to note that "Dynamo" and "DynamoDB" are two very different things that happen to share many of the same letters. DynamoDB is not Dynamo.

This Cassandra article should provide some info on virtual nodes. https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/archite...

Agreed entirely, I do wonder what kind of internal constraints led Amazon to have these limits. Maybe in the future they'll go away, as so many other seemingly arbitrary limits do.

10GB is per partition, not per node.