Steve Hardy presents a practical overview of cloud database technologies, and discusses the impact of technology choices on how they scale and operate. Topics include consistency, availability, IO considerations, developer ease-of-use and which Open Source and non-Open Source tools exist to make them actually happen.

There are a lot of database systems. From the traditional MySQL to log-based databases to object stores to graph databases. You may have wondered why there are so many. The short answer is: each of them scale differently, cost differently, and perform differently depending on your workload. Understanding how they work and what they can do for you will help you selecting a database for your next project, and may open your eyes to doing things quicker and simpler.