Distributed Systems Reading List

An opinionated list of what to read when getting into distributed systems research, loosely ordered by where to start.

Foundational papers

• Lamport (1978) — Time, clocks, and the ordering of events
• Fischer, Lynch, Paterson (1985) — Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process (FLP)
• Brewer (2000) — Towards robust distributed systems (CAP conjecture)
• Gilbert & Lynch (2002) — Brewer’s conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services
• Ongaro & Ousterhout (2014) — In search of an understandable consensus algorithm (Raft)
• Lamport (1998) — The part-time parliament (Paxos)

Systems papers worth reading carefully

• DeCandia et al. (2007) — Dynamo: Amazon’s highly available key-value store
• Chang et al. (2006) — Bigtable: A distributed storage system for structured data
• Corbett et al. (2012) — Spanner: Google’s globally distributed database
• Moraru, Andersen, Kaminsky (2013) — There is more consensus in Egalitarian parliaments (EPaxos)

Textbooks

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Kleppmann — best practical introduction
• Distributed Systems, van Steen & Tanenbaum — comprehensive reference
• Database Internals, Petrov — excellent on storage engines and consensus

Essential reading online

• The Raft website and visualisation (thesecretlivesofdata.com)
• Martin Kleppmann’s lecture notes (University of Cambridge)
• Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen analyses (jepsen.io)