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Apache ZooKeeper

Apache ZooKeeper is a distributed service that coordinates nodes in a cluster, providing synchronization and shared data management. It offers services such as naming, configuration management, leader election, and locking, ensuring reliability and atomicity in data handling. ZooKeeper is utilized by various applications like Apache Storm, Kafka, and YARN for state management and failure recovery.

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48 views3 pages

Apache ZooKeeper

Apache ZooKeeper is a distributed service that coordinates nodes in a cluster, providing synchronization and shared data management. It offers services such as naming, configuration management, leader election, and locking, ensuring reliability and atomicity in data handling. ZooKeeper is utilized by various applications like Apache Storm, Kafka, and YARN for state management and failure recovery.

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Suresh
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What is Apache ZooKeeper Meant For?

Apache ZooKeeper is a service used by a cluster (group of nodes) to coordinate


between themselves and maintain shared data with robust synchronization
techniques. ZooKeeper is itself a distributed application providing services for
writing a distributed application.

Workflow:
 Once a ZooKeeper ensemble starts, it will wait for the clients to connect.
 Clients will connect to one of the nodes in the ZooKeeper ensemble.
 It may be a leader or a follower node. Once a client is connected, the node
assigns a session ID to the particular client and sends an acknowledgement to
the client.
 If the client does not get an acknowledgment, it simply tries to connect another
node in the ZooKeeper ensemble.
 Once connected to a node, the client will send heartbeats to the node in a regular
interval to make sure that the connection is not lost.

The common services provided by ZooKeeper are as follows −

 Naming service − Identifying the nodes in a cluster by name. It is similar to


DNS, but for nodes.

 Configuration management − Latest and up-to-date configuration


information of the system for a joining node.

 Cluster management − Joining / leaving of a node in a cluster and node status


at real time.

 Leader election − Electing a node as leader for coordination purpose.

 Locking and synchronization service − Locking the data while modifying it. This
mechanism helps you in automatic fail recovery while connecting other
distributed applications like Apache HBase.

 Highly reliable data registry − Availability of data even when one or a few
nodes are down.
Distributed applications offer a lot of benefits, but they throw a few complex and
hard-to-crack challenges as well. ZooKeeper framework provides a complete
mechanism to overcome all the challenges. Race condition and deadlock are
handled using fail-safe synchronization approach. Another main drawback is
inconsistency of data, which ZooKeeper resolves with atomicity.

Benefits of ZooKeeper

Here are the benefits of using ZooKeeper −

 Simple distributed coordination process

 Synchronization − Mutual exclusion and co-operation between server


processes. This process helps in Apache HBase for configuration
management.

 Ordered Messages

 Serialization − Encode the data according to specific rules. Ensure your


application runs consistently. This approach can be used in MapReduce to
coordinate queue to execute running threads.

 Reliability

 Atomicity − Data transfer either succeed or fail completely, but no transaction


is partial.

Ensemble Group of ZooKeeper servers. The minimum number of nodes that is


required to form an ensemble is 3.

Leader Server node which performs automatic recovery if any of the


connected node failed. Leaders are elected on service startup.

Follower Server node which follows leader instruction.

ZooKeeper node is referred as znode.

There are following two types of nodes in Zookeeper-


 Leader Node - Leader Node is the only node responsible for processing the
write requests. All other nodes called followers simply delegate the client
write calls to Leader node.(We currently have two leader election algorithms in
ZooKeeper: LeaderElection and FastLeaderElection)

 We don't mark any node as leader while setting up Apache ZooKeeper


cluster. It instead is elected internally among all the nodes of cluster. Apache
ZooKeeper uses the concept of majority for same i.e. Node that gets highest
number of votes is elected as Leader.

 This serves as the basis of recommendation that suggests to have odd


number of nodes in a cluster for best failover and availability. E.g. if we create
the cluster of four nodes and two nodes go offline for some reason. Apache
ZooKeeper will be down as half of the nodes have gone offline as it is not
possible to gain majority for Leader node election. However if we create the
cluster of five nodes, even if two nodes go offline, Apache ZooKeeper will still
be functional as we still have majority of nodes in service.

 Follower Nodes - All nodes other than Leader are called Follower Nodes. A
follower node is capable of servicing read requests on its own. For write
requests, it gets it done through Leader Node. Followers also play an
important role of electing a new leader if existing leader node goes down.

Below are some of instances where Apache ZooKeeper is being utilized -

 Apache Storm, being a real time stateless processing/computing framework,


manages its state in ZooKeeper Service

 Apache Kafka uses it for choosing leader node for the topic partitions

 Apache YARN relies on it for the automatic failover of resource manager


(master node)

 Yahoo! utilties it as the coordination and failure recovery service for Yahoo!
Message Broker, which is a highly scalable publish-subscribe system
managing thousands of topics for replication and data delivery. It is used by
the Fetching Service for Yahoo! crawler, where it also manages failure
recovery.

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