[ozanonay]

I teach a course on database systems, including one class on distributed databases (like Dynamo and Spanner) and another on dataflow engines (like MapReduce/Hadoop and Spark).

Students seem to find the Dynamo paper to be the single most enlightening resource. It does a great job of explaining Amazon's use case and how the solution fits the problem. I also reference the relevant Red Book chapter and some students value that context.

It's worth noting that students are very comfortable with relational DBMSs by this point, both in theory and in practice. It quickly becomes clear to them that NoSQL is better called "no transactions", as they know the costs and benefits of various isolation levels in a traditional RDBMS. If you don't yet have an undergraduate-level background in database systems I'd encourage you to seek that out either first or at least along the way to understanding NoSQL systems. My recommendations for how to do this as a self-learner are up on https://teachyourselfcs.com.

[itcmcgrath]

Yet many non-relational systems do support ACID transactions across multiple resources. Just from Google there is Megastore, Cloud Datastore, Spanner, Cloud Firestore