1·raft.github.io
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version)
Why I added thisSeparate leader election, log replication, and safety through Raft's decomposition.
A CURATED READING LIST
Paxos, Raft and Distributed Consensus
Consensus connects a compact safety argument to a substantial amount of engineering. Begin with Raft's decomposition of a replicated log, then use Paxos Made Simple to isolate the problem of choosing a value. The original Paxos paper adds historical context and a fuller presentation. Paxos Made Live shows what implementing a dependable service required beyond the algorithm, while Zab provides another perspective on primary-backup broadcast and recovery. Reconfiguration finishes the sequence by changing the participants themselves. This is an intermediate-to-advanced path for readers comfortable with concurrency. Track safety, liveness, and failure assumptions separately, and draw a message trace before deciding that two protocols provide the same behavior. 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.
Curated by JakeUpdated Oct 10, 2026
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2·lamport.azurewebsites.net
Paxos Made Simple
Why I added thisFollow the safety argument for choosing one value before studying replicated logs.
3·lamport.azurewebsites.net
The Part-Time Parliament
Why I added thisRevisit the original Paxos presentation after learning the core protocol.
4·static.googleusercontent.com
Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective
Why I added thisIdentify engineering work that remains after the consensus algorithm is chosen.
5·www.cs.cornell.edu
Zab: High-performance broadcast for primary-backup systems
Why I added thisCompare primary-backup broadcast and recovery with consensus-based log replication.
6·www.microsoft.com
Reconfiguring a State Machine
Why I added thisExtend the replication model to changes in cluster membership.
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Advanced Distributed Systems Research Papers
Use this collection after the fundamentals, consensus, and storage paths to explore design choices that cross those boundaries. Gray's economics paper and the data-engineering rules establish a cost-oriented way to reason about placement and caching; their numerical examples are historical, not present-day purchasing advice. The next papers examine ordering throughput and wide-area replication. Eventually consistent counters provide a focused replication problem, followed by Photon and Mesa as larger systems with demanding data-processing requirements. For each resource, identify the bottleneck, the mechanism introduced to address it, and the new constraint that mechanism creates. The sequence works well for a reading group because the papers invite concrete comparisons of assumptions and evaluation methods rather than agreement on one preferred architecture. 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.
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Transaction guarantees are easiest to discuss when their scope and observable behavior are explicit. Start with an everyday service interaction that motivates asynchronous work and compensation. The PostgreSQL chapter provides concrete isolation terminology, but it is deliberately identified as historical version documentation. Strong consistency models helps distinguish ordering guarantees from transaction isolation before the HAT paper analyzes which transactional properties can coexist with high availability. Megastore and Spanner then provide two system-level case studies. This sequence suits engineers designing workflows that span records, services, or datacenters. Write a short concurrent execution for every guarantee you intend to require, and separate the atomicity of a business workflow from the semantics of an individual database transaction. 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.
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ReadingTrackA little more read. A little more remembered.