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Amazon's Dynamo paper (PDF) is the paper that launched a thousand NoSQL databases, if you'll pardon a twisted metaphor and wee bit of exaggeration. The paper inspired, at least in part, Apache Cassandra, Voldemort, Riak and other projects. Now Amazon is making its own take on Dynamo, melded with SimpleDB, available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels wrote about the new service this morning on his blog, saying that Amazon DynamoDB is "the result of 15 years of learning in the areas of large scale non-relational databases and cloud services."

A few weeks ago, Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, published a long technical paper on his blog about Amazon's highly available storage system called Dynamo. The paper itself is quite complex and technical and includes a description of the architecture, algorithms and tests that Amazon has been doing with the system.

Yet, even from a casual glance, it is clear that Amazon's work is very important. Since early last year, the e-commerce giant has been making forays into becoming a Web OS company. Amazon has been methodically exposing pieces of its own infrastructure as commodity web services, and in the process confusing Wall Street analysts and making thousands of startups quite happy.