In the early days of Mailgun I started working on a distributed lock service. Something I had worked on briefly at Rackspace. Even as I implemented the thing, I had the sneaky suspicion that it was a bad idea. So, let’s talk about why the locking service never took off at Mailgun… The Synchronization problem In both distributed and monolithic systems, you often MUST have things which are performed in an orderly or synchronized manner. In almost all cases where synchronization is required, it is ...