1. A method for revoking one or more soft locks on data containers stored on nodes of a distributed system, the method comprising: determining, at a first node, whether the one or more soft locks need to be revoked to enable processing of a data access request directed to a data container; said soft locks applying to a region of the data container, said data container being a subset of a volume; in response to determining that one or more soft locks need to be revoked, sending to a second node a request to remove the one or more soft locks; scheduling, at the second node, a request to release one or more soft locks on the data container; marking the one or more soft locks as in the process of being revoked to ensure that all clients within the distributed system share consistent views of each soft lock; obtaining, at the second node, an exclusive lock on a set of meta-data for the container; marking as invalid, by the second node, the set of meta-data and causing all nodes in the distributed system to mark the set of meta-data as invalid and to thereby update a local cache of the set of meta-data from the second node; marking the one or more soft locks as revoked; releasing the exclusive lock on the set of meta-data; and responding to the request to remove the one or more soft locks.