This document discusses the challenges in building reliable distributed systems and introduces Apache BookKeeper as a solution. Apache BookKeeper provides a distributed log that can be used as a building block to address issues like failures, inconsistencies, and recovery in distributed systems. It provides durability, replication, and consistency guarantees using write-ahead logging and a quorum-based protocol. The document outlines BookKeeper's architecture, guarantees, APIs, and various use cases from companies like Yahoo, Hadoop, and Hubspot.