Not a day. Not a mock. Recommend, not required. Open a paper note only when you need vocabulary you can spend in an answer. Do not summarize a paper in the room.
Time box
Under 40 minutes per paper, or skip until an interview is on the calendar. Do not read all three the night before a mock instead of sleeping.
| Paper | Open when | Full note |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamo | Consistent hashing, hinted handoff, sloppy quorum, nodes wrong or gone | Dynamo |
| Spanner | External consistency, why a global transaction is expensive | Spanner |
| Raft | Leader, log, election window as a dependency | Raft |
Rules for the room
- Take only what you can use in an answer.
- Do not cite a paper as permission to skip a consistency choice.
- Do not derive the protocol on the whiteboard.
- Days 18, 30, 35, and 36 already own the interview moves. These notes deepen the words; they do not replace those days.
One sentence each
- Dynamo: leaderless copies with overlap rules, and a failure model where a preferred node is gone — plus the repair story you owe if you took a sloppy write.
- Spanner: externally consistent transactions at global scale, paid for with synchronized time and cross-region coordination you do not invent on a whiteboard.
- Raft: a replicated log with one leader and a bounded window with no leader — buy it as a dependency, do not re-implement votes and terms in the hour.
Pick one note. Close the others.