Supposedly a big chunk of Alibaba's backend infrastructure runs on its custom-developed distributed datastore called Oceanbase, which is available on Github here[1] and here[2].

There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this software.

Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more technical detail.

[1] https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase

[2] https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5

[3] http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf

Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.)

I've accessed this [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7...] but it was only the abstract, not the full paper in printed form.

There are a bunch of references here, but not in English: http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase