Systems Papers You Must Read (imho)

The following list provides a collection of papers that I personally consider important pieces of work in systems and recommend all of my students to read. However, especially in the last few years, the systems research community has grown immensely, which makes it virtually impossible to write a compreshensive list of all important papers in the field. As a result, you will notice absence of entire subfields, such as networking and security, mostly because I am not knowledgable enough in those areas to make comprehensive list.

Feel free to reach out, if you know of any paper that should really be part of this list. I am also happy to add links to any material (blogposts, videos, etc.) that make the papers easier to understand.

Consensus and Replication

Database Systems and Distributed Storage

Filesystems and Local Sotrage

Operating Systems

Cloud and Serverless

Miscellaneous