A primitive that enables this consensus must also be highly available, consistent, and partition-tolerant. In AWS, the many moving parts of Amazon EC2 also need to agree on what their configuration should be so that they can survive many different failure modes. To ensure data is always accurate, you need to ensure that only one application server in your application server fleet is modifying a particular record in your database. For example, perhaps you have a database that serves as the central source of truth for your application. The protocol in the lock client Java library is widely applicable, and we encourage you to apply it in other languages.ĭistributed locking can be a complicated challenge to solve, because you need to atomically ensure only one actor is modifying a stateful resource at any given time. The DynamoDB Lock Client wraps up the necessary client logic for distributed advisory locks in an easy-to-use client interface. However, the AWS SDK doesn’t include the logic needed to actually implement distributed locks.

The DynamoDB Lock Client is a Java Library widely used inside Amazon, which enables you to solve distributed computing problems like leader election and distributed locking with client-only code and a DynamoDB table.ĭynamoDB supports mechanisms, like conditional writes, that are necessary for distributed locks. Here we have a contribution from Alex and Sasha, who work on teams supporting about a new client library that they developed to make their applications better – hopefully you’ll find it useful too. Alexander Patrikalakis and Sasha Slutsker are senior software development engineers with Amazon.Īt Amazon, teams all across the company build upon AWS services just like AWS’s external customers.

Aws dynamodb client configuration