Comment by mjb
3 hours ago
This is not a bad list for sure. Here are some deeper cuts for those looking for something a bit less mainstream:
"The Maintenance of Duplicate Databases" https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc677 (AFAIK the genesis of the use of logical clocks in distributed systems).
"Chain Replication for Supporting High Throughput and Availability" https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/... (Chain replication is how a huge percentage of real-world cloud-scale data replication is done).
"Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services" (The formalization of CAP, which caused a ton of very poor trade-off thinking in the decade that followed by defining Availability in a very goofy way. Still a classic.)
"Paxos Made Live" https://research.google/pubs/paxos-made-live-an-engineering-... (Brought a much-needed engineering perspective to a conversation that was largely theoretical up until this time.)
"Practical Byzantine fault tolerance" (Moved the conversation on Byzantine faults forward significantly).
This is just a short selection. There's so much good stuff going back in the 70s and 80s distributed database literature, for example (and in the modern systems and DB literature too).
Lamport lists his collected works on his site[0] along with some commentary for each one, and directly mentions, The Maintenance of Duplicate Databases, as the origin for logical clock paper. Many of the notes have interesting commentary.
> Many computer scientists claim to have read it. But I have rarely encountered anyone who was aware that the paper said anything about state machines. People seem to think that it is about either the causality relation on events in a distributed system, or the distributed mutual exclusion problem. People have insisted that there is nothing about state machines in the paper. I've even had to go back and reread it to convince myself that I really did remember what I had written.[1]
0: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net 1: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#time-clocks
Question from a recent CS grad here, who just learnt about CAP: what do you mean by “very poor trade-off thinking in the decade that followed”?