I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the distributed systems area. (I focused on the core distributed systems area, and did not cover networking, security, distributed ledgers, verification work etc. I even left out distributed transactions, I hope to cover them at a later date.)
I classified the papers by subject, and listed them in chronological order. I also listed expository papers and blog posts at the end of each section.
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Leslie Lamport, Commn. of the ACM, 1978.
Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System. K. Mani Chandy Leslie Lamport, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1985.
Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems. Mattern, F. 1988.
There is No Now. Justin Sheehy, ACM Queue 2015
Why Logical Clocks are Easy. Carlos Baquero and Nuno Preguiça, ACM Queue 2016.
Logical clocks and Vector clocks modeling in TLA+/PlusCal
Coordinated Attack or Two Generals problem is a fundamental impossibility in distributed systems. It started more of folks theorem, so instead of pointing to a paper, I provide a link to the wikipedia page.
Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process, Fischer, Lynch and Patterson, JACM, 1985
Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems, Tushar Deepak Chandra and Sam Toueg, Journal of the ACM, 1996.