[reillyse]

Not actually that hard with a redis lock or any database (Postgres has a specific lock for this but you could also just use a record in a table)

Far easier than the original single threaded solution - and has fault tolerance baked in cause you can run it on multiple clients

[lmm]

> Not actually that hard with a redis lock or any database (Postgres has a specific lock for this but you could also just use a record in a table)

Redis is just another SPOF, and so is Postgres without fiddly third party extensions (that are pretty unreliable in practice, IME). I'm talking about something truly distributed.

[virgilp]

What, you need something truly "internet-scale" to make sure your thousands of clients can hit, sequentially, that one faulty api? Would you really be concerned more about Redis failure rates, than said API's failure rates?

[DmitryOlshansky]

Or zookeeper for that matter.