Here is Stanford's recommended reading: https://www.scs.stanford.edu/22sp-cs244b/sched/
Here is CMU's: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440/readings/
I would imagine you will end up reading various papers on things like:
spanner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)
cassandra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra
paxos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)
raft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm)
two-phase commit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol