Re:Distributed Locks Are Dead; Long Live Distributed Locks
by hinkley on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @02:28PM
(#20107623)
Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.
I think the first time I encountered the idea of leases it was dabbling in some CORBA code, back when enough people knew what that acronym means that Sun Microsystems thought they should include an orb in the dev kit. And then again in their RPC mechanism for Java.
Since then I've encountered the concept from others only a handful of times. Object leases aren't that important if your distributed state is straightforward. Platonic REST with no state doesn't need them, nor really do the fully stateful servers we had for about 20 years. And then there are concensus protocols like Raft which fill in some of the gaps in between.
I think the first time I encountered the idea of leases it was dabbling in some CORBA code, back when enough people knew what that acronym means that Sun Microsystems thought they should include an orb in the dev kit. And then again in their RPC mechanism for Java.
Since then I've encountered the concept from others only a handful of times. Object leases aren't that important if your distributed state is straightforward. Platonic REST with no state doesn't need them, nor really do the fully stateful servers we had for about 20 years. And then there are concensus protocols like Raft which fill in some of the gaps in between.