Marc Brooker breaks down the jump from Amazon Dynamo to DynamoDB and Aurora DSQL, tracing how the guts of cloud databases have changed. It’s a story about dropping old trade-offs and picking up stronger guarantees.

DynamoDB ditches the old hash-ring replication for multi-AZ replica sets backed by Paxos. More scale, tighter durability. Aurora DSQL goes even further—with a Journal system that spins up independent Paxos logs. That opens the door for cross-shard transactions and full read/write scaling, all without flinching on consistency.