http://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/mature-optimization.pdf Internal performance optimization manual for facebook.
Post: How to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes
hello, educational article and post-mortem document http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lose-172-222-a-second-for-45-minutes
Dynamo is easily understandable and a good intro to distributed eventually consisted databases. http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs239-w08/decandia07dynamo.pdf
Raft is an attempt at making a consensus algorithm that is easily understandable(compared with Paxos). https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/11370504/raft.pdf
Paper: Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations
Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations (Bailis et al.) A very recent but excellent paper.
Reminded of this while reading Dynamo paper. Basic topic but probably can find a good short post that discusses it.
Intro material on hot compatibility and relation to distribution + gradual rollouts.
Book: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions - recommended by @statik.