Skip to main content
Version: 1.0

Zookeeper

  • Enables coordination in distributed systems
  • Main cluster state and notify any changes
  • Needed to:
    • Manage configuration around the cluster
    • Have leader to perform updates, writes, ...
    • Lock resources
  • Challenges of Distributed Applications
    • Race condition: two machines try to perform a task, which should be performed by one machine
    • Deadlock: two or more operations waiting other to complete
    • Inconsistency: partial failure of data

Components​

  • Client: sends heartbeats to inform the server that is alive

  • Server: sends acknowledgment

  • Zookeeper ensemble: set of servers. Minimum nodes required to form assemble is 3

  • Leader: recover failed nodes

  • Follower: follows leader instructions

  • Namespaces:

    • Znode: each node have name and sequence of path separated by (/)
    • Config: centralized configuration
    • Workers: used for naming

  • Data model

    • stat
      • Version number
      • ACL
      • Timestamp
      • Data length

Znode​

  • Maintain a stats structure

  • Can store data and have children at same time

  • Stores information (last version, transaction Id of last transaction, ...)

  • Have ACL (create, write, read, delete and admin)

  • Support authentication username / password

  • Client can set watcher on znode to get notified when change occurs

    • Data change
    • Change an any znode
    • Child znode created or deleted

  • Types

    1. Persistence: permanent node they are only deleted manually (default)
    2. Ephemeral: delete by Zookeeper when (-e flag to create)
      • Client who created it close the session
      • No request from client after timeout session (use by Kafka to maintain brokers)
    3. Sequential: same as ephemeral just Zoopkeeper assigns number of 10 digits during the creation and increment this number when other sequential is created (-s flag to create)

  • Session: create between client and zookeeper

    • Client sends heartbeats
    • Fails If no heartbeat was sent after certain period (timeout)

  • Watchers: mechanism used by client to get changes in Zookeeper

Config​

  • server.X=hostname:peerPort:leaderPort

    • X: should be integer
    • hostname: ip of the host
    • peerPort: port on which ensemble communicates
    • leaderPort: port used to elect leader
    • clientPort: port used to communicate with client

  • If leader goes down => followers store are notified and store the latest change in cluster data storage

Commands​

  • Create: create /znode_test "this is the data of the znode_test"
  • Get: get /znode_test
  • Create child: create /znode_test/child_1 "this is the data of chid_1"
  • Delete: delete /znode_test/child_1
  • Get ACL: getAcl /znode_test

Election​

  • Herd effet