Evaluation of Key-Value Stores for Distributed Locking Purposes

This paper presents the evaluation of key-value stores and corresponding algorithms with regard to the implementation of distributed locking mechanisms. Research focuses on the comparison between four types of key-value stores, etcd, Consul, Zookeeper, and Redis. For each selected store, the underlying implementation of locking mechanisms was described and evaluated with regard to satisfying safety, deadlock-free, and fault tolerance properties. For the purposes of performance testing, a small application supporting all of the key-value stores was developed. The application uses all of the selected solutions to perform computation while ensuring that a particular resource is locked during that operation. The aim of the conducted experiments was to evaluate selected solutions based on performance and properties that they hold, in the context of using them as a base for building a distributed locking system.