Distributed Transactions at Scale in Amazon DynamoDB

NoSQL cloud database services are popular for their simple key-value operations, high availability, high scalability, and predictable performance. These characteristics are generally considered to be at odds with support for transactions that permit atomic and serializable updates to partitioned data. This paper explains how transactions were added to Amazon DynamoDB using a timestamp ordering protocol while exploiting the semantics of a keyvalue store to achieve low latency for both transactional and non-transactional operations. The results of experiments against a production implementation demonstrate that distributed transactions with full ACID properties can be supported without compromising on performance, availability, or scale.