I've learned heaps from reading the papers that these companies publish. Google, Facebook, and Amazon all publish well written, readable, papers. If you're looking for somewhere to start, then the Dynamo paper is a classic: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp...
just curious: "learned heaps" --> did it just improve your knowledgebase or it actually helped you practically to solve a problem which you were facing.? I am just curious, as I am a starter to reading these kind of papers. thanks.
A bit of both, some like the Dynamo paper helped me understand Cassandra better, while other like Spanner aren't directly applicable to my day to day work but introduced me to new ideas.
