The 1987 Saga model broke long-lived transactions into smaller committed steps plus compensating actions, creating a recovery model that later became central to distributed service workflows.
Epidemic and gossip protocols use repeated randomized peer exchanges to spread updates, trading deterministic delivery paths for scalable, failure-tolerant dissemination.
Conflict-free replicated data types use algebraic structure and carefully constrained operations so replicas can accept updates independently and still converge without a central conflict resolver.
Amazon Dynamo treated machine and network failures as normal, combining consistent hashing, replication, quorum techniques and version reconciliation to keep key-value services available.