Distributed locking with liveness checks is exactly what zookeeper excels at. I wrote a one-click deploy (via cloudformation) self-healing zookeeper cluster on

Distributed locking with liveness checks is exactly what zookeeper excels at. I wrote a one-click deploy (via cloudformation) self-healing zookeeper cluster on AWS (wrapping netflix exhibitor for the pretty GUI and config reloads) that has been running since the beginning of 2014 on ~$100/mo in production without issue. It's roughly 200-300 lines of ops config, because exhibitor makes everything easy. Consider biting the bullet! If you want to discuss further, my email is in my HN profile.