
Show HN: Locklock.io – Lock-as-a-service, REST API for easy distributed locking - asdfasdf45
https://locklock.io
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ryanworl
Left this comment in your live chat, this doesn't appear to have any provision
for supporting fencing. This means it will not work under many common failure
scenarios.

[https://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do-
distribute...](https://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do-distributed-
locking.html)

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asdfasdf45
Great point, thanks for your comment!

We stayed away from implementing more advanced locking features in the initial
version, but since it came up this early we'll definitely work on it.

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asdfasdf45
We built Locklock mainly because simple patterns of distributed locking kept
coming up in our system designs.

The common use case is ensuring multiple components of a distributed system
take turns accessing a shared resource.

A special case of that is guaranteeing a particular operation takes place at
most once. For example, some AWS services guarantee at-least-once delivery,
but sometimes consequences of these events need to execute exactly once. To
accomplish this, simply acquire a lock for the identifier representing the
originating event and don't release it.

Our secondary motivation was to unify locking logic across components of a
distributed system, which may be written using different programming languages
or deployed accross multiple cloud providers. By using Locklock, they only
need to know how to communicate with a simple REST API.

Would really appreciate feedback from the community!

