Danish Rehman
Danish is a Staff Software Engineer at Attentive, where he plays a key role in shaping the architecture and scalability of our product. With nearly 15 years of experience in building distributed systems for high traffic ad-tech and e-commerce, he has been instrumental in developing our next-generation marketing solutions powered by AI. Outside of work, Danish enjoys gardening, vermiculture, and rock climbing. He loves sharing his harvest with his four-year old son before they head out on climbing adventures together.
Goodbye Distributed Locks: Message Orchestration at Scale with Apache Pulsar
At Attentive, we built a high-throughput messaging platform powered by Apache Pulsar, handling 3.9 billion messages during Cyber Week - including 620 million SMS on Black Friday alone. This talk covers our shift from Redis-based distributed locks to Pulsar’s native subscription modes. We’ll explain how SHARED mode caused user-level inconsistencies and how moving to FAILOVER and ultimately KEY_SHARED enabled infrastructure-enforced exclusivity. Attendees will learn why user-level mutual exclusivity matters in real-time orchestration, the trade-offs between locking and Pulsar modes, and how to balance exclusivity, fault tolerance, and performance in large-scale event-driven systems.