I personally like Pat Helland's paper, "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An apostate’s opinion", which goes into "practical approaches used in the implementations of large-scale mission-critical applications in a world which rejects distributed transactions."

2007 Biennial Conference on Innovative DataSystems Research (CIDR) version (pdf) https://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs223/papers/cidr07p15.pdf

2016 version from ACM Queue https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3012426.3025012