Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In
Buzzword headline aside, the Spanner paper is great and worth your time. As is the BigTable paper, the Dremel paper, and the Paxos Made Live paper.I read the Google whitepapers and wonder, is there anywhere else one can go to work on real solutions to distributed systems problems? At smaller scales you can cheat -- you don't need Paxos, you can get away with non-consensus-based master / slave failover. You can play the odds with failure modes. At Google's scale, you can't: behavior under normally unlikely failures matters, probability matters, CAP matters.