Google's lock service provides an easy interface for master elections, distributed locks, and naming. This paper states "Chubby was an engineering effort [...]; it was not research." However, I think Burrows is wrong: This is great research, and is exactly the kind that academics are bad at. He presents a novel design which provides a useful abstraction for building distributed systems. Best of all, it has been tested extensively inside Google, and he presents useful information about what worked and what didn't. I would like to read more papers like this.
M. Burrows. The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems. In Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI'06), Seattle, USA, November 2006.