Tech Blog

Leader Election with Zookeeper

Jul 10, 2011 at 8:19 AM by Erez Mazor | 2 Comments

Recently we had to implement an active-passive redundancy of a singleton service in our production environment where the general rule is always have “more than one of anything”. The main motivation is to alleviate the need to manually monitor and manage these services, whose presence is crucial to the overall health of the site.

This means that we sometime have a service installed on several machines for redundancy, but only one of the is active at any given moment. If the active services goes down for some reason, another service rises to do its work. This is actually called leader election. One of the most prominent open source implementation facilitating the process of leader election is Zookeeper. So what is Zookeeper?

Originally developed by Yahoo reasearch, Zookeepr acts as a service providing reliable distributed coordination. It is highly concurrent, very fast and suitable mainly for read-heavy access patterns. Reads can be done against any node of a Zookeeper cluster while writes a quorum-based. To reach a quorum, Zookeeper utilizes an atomic broadcast protocol. So how does it work?

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Posted in Dev Methods, Uncategorized, leader election, spring, zookeeper| 2 Comments