What makes this paper special is that it is one of the only published papers about a production cloud blobstore. The 800-pound gorilla in this space is Amazon S3, but I find Windows Azure Storage (WAS) the more interesting system since it provides strong consistency, additional features like append, and serves as the backend for not just WAS Blobs, but also WAS Tables (structured data access) and WAS Queues (message delivery). It also occupies a different design point than hash-partitioned blobstores like Swift and Rados.
This paper, “Windows Azure Storage: A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency” by Calder et al., was published at SOSP ’11.