Distributed Locks: What They Actually Guarantee
A distributed lock cannot promise mutual exclusion, because it cannot control the process holding it. What it can do is still useful — provided you know which of the two problems you have.
6 min read
Kartik Mavani
Staff Software Engineer at
Software · Systems · Cloud · AI
Understanding how technology works beneath the abstractions.
Featured writing
All writingWhy Kafka Ordering Is Harder Than It Looks
Kafka gives you ordering per partition. Almost every ordering bug in production comes from a gap between that guarantee and the one people believed they had.
6 min read
What Happens Beneath the Abstractions
Every abstraction is a bet about what you will never need to know. Understanding the bet is most of what separates engineers who can debug a system from engineers who can only operate one.
6 min read
About
More about meI write about software engineering, distributed systems, cloud architecture and AI — with a particular interest in the reasoning behind technical decisions and what happens beneath the abstractions.
Most engineering content explains how to use a thing. I am more interested in why it was built that way: the trade-offs that were made, the failure modes that shaped the design, and what actually happens when the abstraction stops holding.
Currently
What I'm doing nowBuilding
- An agentic pipeline for discovering and reasoning over technical content, with a focus on how much of the orchestration actually needs to be an agent.
- This site — a place to think in public about software, systems, cloud and AI.