The following principles of distributed system design were used to meet Amazon S3 requirements:
Decentralization: Use fully decentralized techniques to remove scaling bottlenecks and single points of failure.
Asynchrony: The system makes progress under all circumstances.
Autonomy: The system is designed such that individual components can make decisions based on local information.
Local responsibility: Each individual component is responsible for achieving its consistency; this is never the burden of its peers.