If you assume that your distributed lock gives you transactional guarantees that you are the only lock holder then you are making a mistake. If, however, you can tolerate small overlaps in lock holders you are fine and this helps with numerous distributed algorithms. Further, using other facilities such as fences can make it even more secure. Another feature of ZooKeeper is write-with-version. You could obtain a lock (using Apache Curator - note I wrote this), then do a write-with-version to achieve 100% certainty that you are the only writer.