Papers

Hellerstein et al.

A balanced critique of the serverless model. Made me think harder about when Lambda is the right tool and when it isn't.

Diego Ongaro, John Ousterhout

Required reading after getting my CKA. Understanding Raft made etcd and Kubernetes leader election finally click.

DeCandia et al.

The paper behind DynamoDB. Explains consistent hashing, vector clocks, and eventual consistency better than any textbook I've found.

Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat

The paper that made large-scale parallelism feel tractable. Fundamental reading for anyone working with cloud-scale data pipelines.