Here are some topics/URLs to read:

• 8 fallacies of distributed computing:
  • http://www.rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf
• Gossip Protocols
• Anti-entropy algorithms
  • Merkle Trees
• 2-phase commit
• Paxos
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29
  • http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf
  • http://pine.cs.yale.edu/pinewiki/Paxos
  • http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs7412/2011sp/paxos.pdf
• Inverted index vs. index
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index
• Phi Accural Failure Detection
  • http://ddg.jaist.ac.jp/pub/HDY+04.pdf
• Codd's "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shard Data Banks"
  • http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
• Jim Gray's "The Transaction Concept"
  • http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/papers/theTransactionConcept.pdf
• Gregor Hohpe's "Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit"
  • http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html
• Flixster sharding strategies
  • http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/06/20
• Berkley "The Case for Shared Nothing"
  • http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/hpts85-nothing.pdf
• IDC research paper "The Expanding Digital Universe"
  • http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/expanding-digital-idc-white-paper.pdf
• Amazon's Dynamo paper
  • http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html
• Dwight Merriman (video on CAP spectrum)
  • http://bit.ly/7r6kRg
• Facebook Cassandra paper
  • http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshman-ladis2009.pdf
• Twitter Cassandra analytics
  • http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/cassandra-at-twitter-today.html
• Cloudkick using Cassandra for metrics
  • https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/2010/mar/02/4_months_with_cassandra
• Staged Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA)
  • http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda
• BigTable
  • http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable.html
• Hadoop-related tech:
  • map reduce
  • whirr
  • flume
  • oozie
  • mahout
  • hue
  • hbase
  • flume
  • hive
  • pig
  • spark - see the white paper spark is based on: https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/papers/2012/nsdi_spark.pdf
  • comparison of spark and stratosphere: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:605106/FULLTEXT01.pdf
  • yarn

Books:

• Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
• Cassandra: The Definitive Guide
• MongoDB Applied Design Patterns
• Graph Databases (Robinson)
• Learning Spark (Karau et al) - this one's not published yet (I have an early release copy)