Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store

Dynamo is the classic availability-first storage paper. It is worth reading for how partitioning, quorums, hinted handoff, vector clocks, and application-level conflict resolution combine into a product-shaped system.

Reading focus: How consistent hashing and sloppy quorums support availability targets. Why conflict handling can become an application contract. How production constraints shape data-store architecture.

SOSP 2007. DeCandia et al.. 60 min read, hard difficulty.