Cloud computing is a new trend in information technology. Cloud computing is an internet-based computing model that enables users to access computer resources from multiple remote locations. Users can pay for these resources as they go and not upfront, allowing them to have more flexibility in their IT spending. ZooKeeper is an open-source software that helps to manage distributed systems with a focus on high availability, fault tolerance, and quick session recovery. It uses a leader-based consensus protocol and the idea of znodes (znode being a file system namespace) to create self-organizing nodes that are able to gracefully handle failures and continue functioning. In this blog, we will see What is ZooKeeper in Cloud Computing? Let’s get started!
What is ZooKeeper?
ZooKeeper in Cloud Computing is a centralized service for managing distributed systems (e.g., Hadoop clusters) that provides distributed synchronization, failure detection, and recovery. It can also be used for distributed locking, distributed configuration, and the establishment of distributed naming and discovery protocols such as an ensemble of replicated Apache Curator services. ZooKeeper is a distributed transactional coordination service used to manage all the resources in a distributed environment. The resources can be anything like configuration details, distributed locks, and naming services. It uses a leader-based consensus protocol and the idea of znodes (znode being a file system namespace) to create self-organising nodes which are able to gracefully handle failures and continue functioning.
What are the features of ZooKeeper in Cloud Computing?
ZooKeeper is a free, open-source service that allows configuration information and synchronization to be shared and used in many places. It uses an Apache consensus protocol and has automatic failover in case something goes wrong. It is also able to handle server unavailability, due to network outages, machine failures, and so on. ZooKeeper has the following important features:
- Strongly consistent distributed naming and synchronization: Data in ZooKeeper is strongly consistent, which means that all operations (writes and deletes) are atomic and all nodes see the same data at the same time. This is useful for synchronization between different nodes and naming services.
- Failover and recovery: In the event of failures, ZooKeeper has the capability to failover (recover) to another machine and continue to operate.
- Scalability: Zookeeper is highly scalable, and can handle thousands of concurrent clients.
Key Benefits of Cloud ZooKeeper
Cloud ZooKeeper provides a highly available distributed environment, which can be scaled as per the load. It is ideal for use cases such as service discovery, configuration, high availability, and distributed locking and naming services. It is a key component for distributed systems and has been used with Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. Cloud ZooKeeper provides the following benefits:
- Strong consistency: Data is strongly consistent, which is important for distributed systems.
- Fault tolerance: It has automatic failover and is fault tolerant.
- Scalability: You can easily scale up or down the number of nodes as per the need.
- Availability: It is available in public and private cloud environments.
Limitations of Cloud ZooKeeper
Cloud ZooKeeper has some limitations as well, such as:
- It is very expensive in the cloud. ZooKeeper is not the right tool for cloud-native applications due to its high overhead and complexity.
- It is not easy to use. It is quite difficult to get started with ZooKeeper, and it is not suitable for all use cases.
- It does not have support for distributed workflows or streaming.
Conclusion
ZooKeeper is an open-source software that helps to manage distributed systems with a focus on high availability, fault tolerance and quick session recovery. It uses a leader-based consensus protocol and the idea of znodes (znode being a file system namespace) to create self-organising nodes which are able to gracefully handle failures and continue functioning. ZooKeeper is a key component for distributed systems and has been used with Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. Cloud ZooKeeper provides a highly available distributed environment, which can be scaled as per the load. It is ideal for use cases such as service discovery, configuration, high availability, and distributed locking and naming services.
