1·pdos.csail.mit.edu
Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Protocol for Internet Applications
Why I added thisStudy identifier rings, lookup routing, and changes to the set of participating nodes.
A CURATED READING LIST
Peer-to-Peer Systems and Distributed Hashing
Distributed lookup separates a key from the machine that currently serves it. Begin with Chord's ring-based lookup, then compare the XOR metric used by Kademlia and the routing substrate provided by Pastry. Scribe demonstrates a service built on top of an overlay, making the relationship between routing and application behavior explicit. Dynamo closes the sequence by placing partitioning beside replication, versioning, and recovery in a storage service. The list is intended for readers comfortable with algorithms and network communication. Trace a lookup before and after a node joins or fails, then record what each design assumes about membership and communication. Focus on routing cost, resilience, and the work required when ownership changes. 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
Start hereChord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Protocol for Internet Applications ↗
Read at your own pace. Save this list to keep track of your progress.
2·pdos.csail.mit.edu
Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric
Why I added thisCompare XOR-based lookup routing with the ring-based design in Chord.
3·rowstron.azurewebsites.net
Pastry: Scalable, decentralized object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems
Why I added thisCompare another decentralized routing substrate and its use of network locality.
4·rowstron.azurewebsites.net
SCRIBE: A large-scale and decentralized application-level multicast infrastructure
Why I added thisSee how multicast groups can be built on the Pastry overlay.
5·www.allthingsdistributed.com
Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
Why I added thisStudy partitioning, versioning, and application-assisted conflict resolution together.
KEEP EXPLORING
More from Jake
7 resources
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.
By Jake
5 resources
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.
By Jake
6 resources
Distributed Transactions and Isolation
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.
By Jake
ReadingTrackA little more read. A little more remembered.