Distributed locks

Mutual exclusion across machines, built on a consensus store with leases. Locks expire if the holder crashes, so they must be combined with fencing tokens to be safe.

Where it shows up in real systems

  • Coordination service

    Runs Raft or ZAB on an odd number of nodes: three nodes survive one failure, five survive two. Use it for small, critical data, never as a general database.

    In production: etcd, Apache ZooKeeper, Consul KV

See it break, then fix it

Build an architecture, send it a day of traffic and outages, and learn why it holds or fails. Free to start.

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