Explore a groundbreaking approach to database design in this conference talk from NSDI '20. Delve into the development of Physalia, a transactional key-value store optimized for large-scale cloud control planes, created by Amazon Web Services. Learn how the team tackled the challenges posed by the CAP theorem and distributed systems operation by implementing millions of tiny databases instead of a single large one. Discover how Physalia achieves both high availability and strong consistency for millions of clients by focusing on specific key accessibility for individual clients. Examine the application of this innovative database in Amazon EBS and other AWS services, and understand how these design patterns can be applied to various distributed systems problems such as control planes, configuration management, and service discovery.