Google's distributed lock service is a highly available, scalable, and fault-tolerant system that provides distributed mutual exclusion for processes running on different machines. The service is called Chubby, and it is used as a building block for various Google services and applications.
Chubby is based on the Paxos consensus algorithm and provides a distributed lock service for processes to acquire locks on shared resources. The resources can be anything from a file to a configuration setting, and the locks ensure that only one process can access the resource at a time.
Chubby consists of a set of servers that run in a replicated mode. The clients interact with the servers to acquire and release locks. The clients can also store data in Chubby, which is replicated across the servers to ensure fault tolerance.
Chubby provides various features such as:
Strong consistency: Chubby provides strong consistency guarantees, which means that all the clients see the same state of the system.
High availability: Chubby is highly available, and it can continue to operate even if some of the servers fail.
Scalability: Chubby can scale to support a large number of clients and resources.
Low latency: Chubby provides low latency for acquiring and releasing locks, which makes it suitable for real-time applications.
Watch mechanism: Chubby provides a watch mechanism, which allows clients to receive notifications when a resource they are interested in changes.
Google uses Chubby as a building block for various services and applications, such as Bigtable, Spanner, and the Google File System (GFS).
