[sriram_malhar]

This can be a useful service, but it needs durability to avoid race conditions.

If the service goes down and restarts, it will it lose all locks currently held. At this point, a new client could obtain the lock, while an older client that is still blissfuly unaware of the service going down may proceed assuming that its lease is still valid.

If it is implemented as a single server, then it must persist the lock info to disk before granting a lock. Or one can get durability using replication. In which case I would just as soon use zookeeper.