Chubby (paper) conceptpaper
Burrows (Google), 2006.
Burrows (Google), 2006. Distributed lock service that became the coordination layer for much of Google. Provided coarse-grained locks, leader election, distributed configuration via a filesystem-like API. ZooKeeper is the well-known open-source equivalent (different design, similar role); etcd serves the same purpose for Kubernetes. The paper that made 'use a consensus-backed coordination service' a standard pattern instead of asking every distributed system to implement consensus from scratch.