The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems
Chubby packages Paxos as a small, highly available file system with advisory locks, used inside Google for leader election and configuration. The paper is candid about how engineers actually used it, including the caching and session design that kept the service usable under load.
Key ideas
- Expose consensus through a familiar file-and-lock interface
- Client caches with invalidation keep read load off the consensus core
- Sequencers and lock delays handle clients that die holding locks
Why read it now
It explains why coordination is offered as a service rather than a library, and it shaped ZooKeeper and etcd.
Question to keep in mind
Why are advisory locks with sequencers safer than trying to make locks mandatory across a network?