My Distributed Systems Reading List
Published on October 18, 2026 · 1 min read
I have collected these distributed systems papers and related links for reference.
Foundations
- Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
- The Byzantine Generals Problem
- Distributed Snapshots
- Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process
- RFC 677: The Maintenance of Duplicate Databases
Consensus and replication
- Viewstamped Replication
- The Part-Time Parliament
- Paxos Made Simple
- Paxos Made Live
- Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
- Chain Replication for Supporting High Throughput and Availability
- In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft)
- Scaling Replicated State Machines with Compartmentalization
Consistency
- Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types
- Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services
- A Critique of the CAP Theorem
- Let’s Consign CAP to the Cabinet of Curiosities
- Don’t Settle for Eventual: Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS
Storage and data processing
- Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store
- Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
- Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing
- Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service
- Distributed Transactions at Scale in Amazon DynamoDB
- Delta: A Highly Available, Strongly Consistent Storage Service Using Chain Replication
- Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP
- Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL
- Thoughts on Google Spanner
Erlang
- Making Reliable Distributed Systems in the Presence of Software Errors
- The BEAM Book: Concurrency/Parallelism
- The Mess We’re In (Joe Armstrong)