A Field Guide to the Papers That Shaped Distributed Systems
A curated bibliography brings together foundational work on consensus, replication, fault tolerance and other core distributed-systems problems.
A selected bibliography published through Hacker News offers a starting point for understanding the research foundations of distributed systems, bringing together papers published between 1978 and 2014.
The list covers event ordering, Byzantine faults, distributed snapshots, the limits of consensus, replication and highly available systems. It also includes later work on Bitcoin and conflict-free replicated data types.
Among the cited papers are Leslie Lamport’s “Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system”, “The Byzantine Generals Problem” by Lamport, Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease, and “Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems” by K. Mani Chandy and Lamport.
The bibliography also includes “The part-time parliament” and “Paxos Made Simple” by Lamport, as well as Brian Oki and Barbara Liskov’s work on viewstamped replication. Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 paper on Bitcoin is included alongside research by Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero and Marek Zawirski on conflict-free replicated data types.
Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout’s “In search of an understandable consensus algorithm”, published in 2014, rounds out the selection. The compilation is presented as a selected introduction to the field, rather than a comprehensive survey or objective ranking.
