How to do distributed locking (2016)

At work we use Temporal and ended up using a dedicated workflow and signals to do distributed locking. Working well so far and the implementation is rather simple, relying on Temporal’s facilities to do the distributed parts of the lock.

I'm keen to use Temporal, but I've heard it can be flaky. In your experience has it worked well?

Rock solid in my experience and kind of a game changer. I’m surprised it’s not more widespread in large orgs.

We use it a ton at my shop for internal things like release rollouts. Fairly big tech company, and same experience. It's an excellent product.

I just discovered Temporal, and I have to say thank you! From what I've seen so far, it seems like the holy grail for workflows, offering very clear high-level task management over complex infrastructure. Is Temporal unique in this space, or are there other alternatives of similar caliber? Given that it was spun off from Uber and is used by top vendors, it sounds like it’s been thoroughly battle-tested.

DBOS [0] is outwardly similar although it's much younger. IIUC, internally DBOS is able to be more efficient and support lower latencies than Temporal because of the way it can push work down into Postgres stored procedures.

[0] https://www.dbos.dev/