Chapter 8: Distributed Locking: Redlock vs ZooKeeper Lease Fencing
Answer-first: Distributed locking guarantees mutual exclusion across independent compute nodes. For high-throughput efficiency tasks, Redis locks with Lua release scripts suffice. However, for mission-critical financial correctness, asynchronous clock drift and GC pauses invalidate Redlock without monotonic fencing tokens; production systems require consensus-backed primitives like ZooKeeper ephemeral sequential znodes or etcd Raft leases with storage-side validation. Prerequisite: Advanced knowledge of distributed consensus protocols (Raft, Paxos, ZAB), asynchronous network failure modes, operating system process scheduling, and Redis internals is required for this chapter. ...