In distributed systems, many processes are running on different nodes that need to collaborate/coordinate with each other to do some task. Coordination can be of different types, for example, to check whether a process is alive or not and what it is responsible for, e.g., resource sharing, group membership, leader election, configurationA list of operational parameters for system processes., etc. Some systems use locking (for example, 2PL and Chubby) to enable resource sharing (a form of coordination) between processes. Other services, like Amazon SQS and Akamai configuration management also use a coordination service as a building block.

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