Another good one (from someone who worked at Amazon) is Pat Helland's "Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion" which details more generally how a system might work without a global transactions. Part of which boils down to delivering idempotent messages to services.
I thought it was interesting because there are a lot of parallels with how REST works but also service orientated architectures.
I recommend the following from that list:
* Keeping Track of 70,000+ Servers: The Akamai Query System
* Improving Performance on the Internet
* The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications
* Scaling a Monitoring Infrastructure for the Akamai Network
Evan Weaver (systems engineer at Twitter) put together a great list of distributed system papers as well. His list is categorized and every paper in it is awesome.
I thought it was interesting because there are a lot of parallels with how REST works but also service orientated architectures.
The paper (and presentation) can be found here (which I'm sure has a few more gems on the page): http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2007/program.html