Dynamo is a set of techniques that together can form a highly available key-value structured storage system[1] or a distributed data store.
It was created to help address some scalability issues that Amazon experienced during the holiday season of 2004.
[1] Amazon DynamoDB is "built on the principles of Dynamo"[3] and is a hosted service within the AWS infrastructure.
The index layer of Amazon S3 implements and extends many core features of Dynamo.
The paper also inspired many other NoSQL database implementations, such as Apache Cassandra, Project Voldemort and Riak.