Azure Cosmos DB Design Patterns | Distributed Lock

Over the years, developers have asked for guidance on designing applications with Azure Cosmos DB, from implementing common NoSQL patterns to leveraging Cosmos DB’s unique capabilities. To make these insights more accessible, we created Azure Cosmos DB Design Patterns—a GitHub repository with sample implementations to help developers solve real-world architectural challenges.

In this episode, Mark Brown and Jasmine Greenaway explore the Global Distributed Lock pattern—a technique for synchronizing access to shared resources in a distributed system. Learn how Azure Cosmos DB’s optimistic concurrency control, time-to-live (TTL) settings, and strong consistency model enable the implementation of a scalable and fault-tolerant distributed lock. The episode also covers fencing tokens, a mechanism to prevent stale processes from incorrectly acquiring locks, ensuring data integrity. See how this pattern can be used to handle scenarios where multiple processes need exclusive access to a resource without relying on pessimistic locking.

#AzureCosmosDB #DistributedLock #NoSQL

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[Damian-cdtj]

Great content! Wouldn’t a stored procedure lock a partition? So you can have a “lock document” in its own partition with some boolean field that tells whether it’s acquired or not, so the stored procedure checks for that field and if it’s not acquired, it sets it to true.