Is Redlock Safe? Reply to Redlock Analysis
This response is incorrect at a very fundamental level.<p>First, Antirez claims that requiring the "materialization" store to be able to tie break with a monotonically increasing token requires linearization? This is completely false. The monotonically increasing token allows for eventual consistency. That's the entire point of it. It's monotonically increasing.<p>For anyone who claims that once you have coordination (locking) in your system you already lost is completely ignoring the research coming out of BOOM (Berkeley Orders of Magnitude). You can design your system to push the coordination out to the edge and way from your "choke points" and use these monotonically increasing tokens to keep your bottlenecks coordination free.<p>Secondly, Antirez's argument that you can use a compare & swap in a transactional storage layer is also wrong. This is not possible to write safely.<p>I'm not even going to touch his argument that using system clocks in a distributed locking algorithm is safe...