Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems
A distributed-systems milestone from 1985 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Category · 11 papers · 2 articles
Distributed systems
Coordination, replication, consensus, and the practical engineering of internet-scale services.
Papers
11 foundational papers
A History of the Virtual Synchrony Replication Model
A distributed-systems milestone from 1987 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Timestamps in Message-Passing Systems That Preserve the Partial Ordering
A distributed-systems milestone from 1989 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
The Process Group Approach to Reliable Distributed Computing
A distributed-systems milestone from 1991 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Google's MapReduce
A distributed-systems milestone from 2004 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Google's BigTable
A distributed-systems milestone from 2006 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Google's Chubby
A distributed-systems milestone from 2006 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Stasis: Flexible Transactional Storage
A distributed-systems milestone from 2006 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Amazon's Dynamo
A distributed-systems milestone from 2007 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
A distributed-systems milestone from 2007 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion
A distributed-systems milestone from 2007 whose ideas keep shaping modern data infrastructure.
Blog articles
2 essays
From Dynamo to FoundationDB: Distributed KV Lineage
The distributed key-value store has evolved from a pragmatic response to web-scale failures into the foundational layer for global data platforms. Early designs accepted relaxed consistency to survive partitions, yet pro...
12 min read
Interview: Consensus in 2026 — Paxos and Raft Revisited
Dr. Aiden Vasquez is a senior distributed-systems engineer with over 20 years of experience in building consensus systems. Formerly an engineer at a Spanner-like project, Dr. Vasquez is now the CTO of ConsensusLabs, wher...
11 min read