Distributed System Classics
Reading and dissecting foundational distributed systems papers — the ideas, algorithms, and trade-offs that shaped how we build systems today.
Posts in this series
- 01.
Why Distributed Systems Can't Trust the Clock
Dissecting Lamport's 1978 paper — how the happens-before relation and logical clocks replaced physical time with causality to order events across distributed systems.
- 02.
Capturing Distributed State: The Chandy-Lamport Algorithm
How do you snapshot an active distributed system without pausing execution? Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport's 1985 paper on consistent cuts, marker waves, and distributed state capture.