ZooKeeper as distributed consensus service
The ability to bring consensus in a network of unreliable services is at the heart of any fault-tolerant distributed system. Apache ZooKeeper is a high-performance open-source server that provides a highly reliable distributed co-ordination and meets the production demands of the web-scale, mission critical applications. ZooKeeper is popular among multi-host, multi-process applications (C, Java bindings) running in data centers. This paper discusses how ZooKeeper is used to implement distributed consensus among the available services. Every complex distributed application needs a service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and/or providing group services. Because of the complexity in implementing these solutions for distributed computing, the more natural preference is to use a tried, tested and reliable solution available in the market. ZooKeeper provides a simple interface to a centralized coordinating service. Th...