The popularity of cloud computing and large-scale distributed systems is rapidly increasing because of the variety of service models and advantages they offer as well as the necessity of individuals and organizations to access their resources easily and efficiently, in addition to the need for more reliable and robust systems. For these reasons, many distributed algorithms have been designed to facilitate the coordination and interconnection among the distributed computational elements to work together in parallel to achieve a common goal. These algorithms are related to various aspects such as consensus, load balancing, scheduling, communication, leader selection and fault tolerance. Many researches have been carried out to investigate and improve the performance of these distributed algorithms. Therefore, this paper studies and compares a variety of research works that has been performed in distributed algorithms for large-scale cloud computing.