It&#x27;s related.<p>Leader election generally[1] requires consensus among distributed processes, and global locks generally[1] require consensus as well. The benefit of this is that both problems can be solved on top of a common consensus implementation which is what <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomix.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomix.io</a> does.<p>1: I say <i>generally</i> because you can do fancy things with fancy clocks to avoid running operations through a quorum under certain circumstances, but these carry caveats that preclude them from being reliable enough to use in many use cases.