[_vvhw]

This is probably one of the best motivations for a distributed database that I've read.

I find that it's not often that people grasp that distribution is about availability. It's obvious when you say it, but for a long time my own intuition was that distribution is about mostly durability or consensus protocols to provide total order across multiple machines. Yet these build together into availability.

In fact, I first noticed this distinction when reading Brian M. Oki's seminal 1988 paper on Viewstamped Replication, the work that would pioneer the field of consensus—a year before Paxos but with an intuitive protocol essentially identical to Raft. The surprising thing is that today many of us might have titled the paper something about "consensus" or "total order" (which it practically invented, and which was the major breakthrough, at least how to do this in the presence of network partitions) but that he titled it "Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems".

I did a short intro talk to Viewstamped Replication (and particularly why FTP or nightly backups or manual failover are not a solution): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jlikdtm4OA

The talk is followed by interviews with Brian M. Oki and James Cowling (authors of the 1988 and 2012 papers respectively).