Kanishka NaikIf a lock holder crashes, the lock must expire via time-to-live. If the TTL is too short, a slow process may lose its lock while still executing, allowing a second process to proceed — a correctness failure in fintech.
Redis and ZooKeeper are widely used for distributed locking. Redis uses key expiry with a time-to-live. ZooKeeper uses ephemeral sequential nodes, where the client holding the lowest sequence number owns the lock.
A distributed lock ensures only one node among many executes an operation at a time. It enforces mutual exclusion across a distributed system to prevent race conditions on shared resources like account balances.