I would take a tour of the top 10 colleges and look through their course syllabi and recommended readings. Here is Stanford's recommended reading: https://www.

I would take a tour of the top 10 colleges and look through their course syllabi and recommended readings. Here is Stanford's recommended reading: https://www.scs.stanford.edu/22sp-cs244b/sched/ https://www.scs.stanford.edu/22sp-cs244b/sched/ Here is CMU's: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440/readings/ https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440/readings/ I would imagine you will end up reading various papers on things like: spanner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database) cassandra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra paxos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) raft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) two-phase commit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol