I don’t think they’ve published anything specifically on S3’s architecture (someone please correct me if I’m wrong, I last looked into this a long time ago), but
1. they came out with S3 soon after coming out with their Dynamo paper (before releasing DynamoDB, even); and
2. there’s a good constructive proof, as a studyable FOSS system, for how to build object storage on top of a Dynamo architecture, in the form of Riak CS (object storage) which is built atop Riak KV (a Dynamo impl.) Riak CS seems to make pretty much the same set of guarantees (in terms of time/space complexity of operations, possible durability numbers per scaled number of copies, etc.) that S3 does, so it’s a fair guess that they’re similarly-architected systems.
1. they came out with S3 soon after coming out with their Dynamo paper (before releasing DynamoDB, even); and
2. there’s a good constructive proof, as a studyable FOSS system, for how to build object storage on top of a Dynamo architecture, in the form of Riak CS (object storage) which is built atop Riak KV (a Dynamo impl.) Riak CS seems to make pretty much the same set of guarantees (in terms of time/space complexity of operations, possible durability numbers per scaled number of copies, etc.) that S3 does, so it’s a fair guess that they’re similarly-architected systems.