Logical Clocks and Ordering in Distributed Systems
Event ordering is a prerequisite for understanding replication conflicts, snapshots, and recovery. Lamport's paper establishes happens-before and explains how logical timestamps can support a total ordering. The dotted version vector examples then make causality concrete in a replicated key-value setting. Interval tree clocks extend the discussion to changing populations of participants, and the global-state survey connects local observations to consistent snapshots. Zab closes the sequence with ordering requirements in a primary-backup service. These resources belong together because they show different uses of ordering rather than presenting timestamps as a universal solution. Draw small executions with concurrent events and delayed messages, and ask what information each mechanism preserves or intentionally discards. Curated from collections by Dan Creswell (https://dancres.github.io/Pages/) and Fred Hébert (https://ferd.ca/a-distributed-systems-reading-list.html); commentary and reading order are original.