Amazon S3 architecture
While the post @ http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture explains Amazon's architecture in general, I am interested in knowing how Amazon S3 is implemented.

Some of my guesses are

1. A distributed file system like HDFS
http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/hdfs_design.html
2. A non relational persistent DB like CouchDB
http://couchdb.apache.org/

Is it be possible to implement something similar to this on a much smaller scale using scripting languages like Python or PHP?
Amazon S3 architecture
===

While the post @ http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture explains Amazon's architecture in general, I am interested in knowing how Amazon S3 is implemented.

Some of my guesses are

1. A distributed file system like HDFS
http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/hdfs_design.html
2. A non relational persistent DB like CouchDB
http://couchdb.apache.org/

Is it be possible to implement something similar to this on a much smaller scale using scripting languages like Python or PHP?