Sato

I guess they start competing with DoubleRecall, the smart YC funded startup[1]. Nice competition!

[1] http://doublerecall.com/

I think it's time to take such an advise seriously. Today's investments go to either successful late stage startups or seed ones[1]. And this trend is likely to continue for a while.

Also, there was a good discussion about profit[2] a week ago. I recommend to take a look.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/30/us-venture-bround-...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3147487

Thanks for jumping in, jrirei!

"with no cache" means no cache in app server layer. I guessed that's how the guy uses the words "no cache".

Getting rid of cache out of app server layer has great benefit on a cloud. 

Having cache in app server layer needs synchronizations to keep data consistent. Scale out design was made before cloud era, when we have our own dedicated system on our site. LAN can afford expensive sync communications, but on a cloud?

Still makes sense if a scenario is read intensive.  But when update intensive?

That's why I see this interesting. Increasing memory is a cheap option on a cloud. So it's great if it scales by letting database utilize more memory. 

Not really.

Consider their scenario. 100,000 db operations and 50,000 updates per sec. In this case, simple cache costs more than without. Eviction is expensive.

Also, it's no surprise replication doesn't scale because Updates get propagated.

Not sure details, but they succeeded to relax the tight requirements of ACID transactions. So this is a good case when RDBMS(or traditional database) fails.

I guess their design is more like MMO, hope to hear from the guy.

I just notified @jrirei of this discussion.

"At the end of the day, all that Amazon is doing is this: helping readers and writers find each other."

I like this idea.