#papers

5 posts · All tags

• Spanner: TrueTime, commit wait and external consistency, explained

  Nov 8, 2026 10 min read

  How Google Spanner orders transactions worldwide: TrueTime intervals, commit wait, Paxos groups, two-phase commit over Paxos, safe time and lock-free reads.

  • #distributed systems
  • #databases
  • #spanner
  • #consistency
  • #papers

• Raft: how a few servers agree on one log, explained

  Nov 1, 2026 11 min read

  How Raft keeps a replicated log consistent: terms, randomized elections, log matching, the Figure 8 commit rule, joint consensus, snapshots, linearizable reads.

  • #distributed systems
  • #consensus
  • #raft
  • #consistency
  • #papers

• Dynamo: Amazon’s always-writeable key-value store, explained

  Oct 26, 2026 12 min read

  How Amazon's 2007 Dynamo kept carts writable: consistent hashing, sloppy quorums, hinted handoff, vector clocks, Merkle anti-entropy, and gossip (SOSP '07).

  • #distributed systems
  • #amazon
  • #key-value store
  • #consistency
  • #papers

• TAO: Facebook’s social graph store — objects, associations, and refill

  Oct 18, 2026 7 min read

  How Facebook's TAO served a billion graph reads/sec: objects & associations, leader/follower caches, refill messages, and master/slave regions (ATC '13).

  • #distributed systems
  • #facebook
  • #graph store
  • #caching
  • #consistency
  • #papers

• Scaling Memcache at Facebook: leases, Gutter, and commit-log invalidation

  Oct 13, 2026 8 min read

  How Facebook scaled memcached to billions of requests per second: leases against thundering herds, Gutter pools, mcsqueal invalidation, and remote markers.

  • #distributed systems
  • #caching
  • #memcached
  • #consistency
  • #papers