Zookeeper: Intro

Zookeeper is a crucial piece of any Big Data deployment at an enterprise scale. It is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and group services. All these services are used by distributed applications. According to the official website, Zookeeper got its name because coordinating distributed systems are a zoo.

At its core, Zookeeper is simple to understand. Think of it as a hierarchical filesystem or tree. The basic building block of Zookeeper is a znode. A znode can store data (like a file) or have child znodes (like a directory). The overall design of Zookeeper provides a highly available system consisting of znodes that make up a hierarchical namespace. The following is a representation of znodes: