What is the main purpose of ZooKeeper?
The primary uses of ZooKeeper include:
- Distributed coordination: ZooKeeper acts as a reliable “coordinator” to help various nodes in a distributed system share and synchronize information, ensuring data consistency.
- Leader election: ZooKeeper supports leader election algorithms to select a node as the “leader” in a distributed system, ensuring high availability of the system.
- Configuration management: ZooKeeper can be used to store and manage configuration information for distributed systems, enabling dynamic updates and management of configurations.
- Naming service: ZooKeeper offers a naming service that allows clients to locate specific resources or services in a distributed environment.
- Distributed locks: ZooKeeper offers a distributed lock mechanism to assist multiple processes or nodes in coordinating access to shared resources and preventing race conditions.
In short, ZooKeeper is primarily used to provide reliable coordination services for distributed systems, helping developers tackle issues such as consistency, availability, and concurrency control in distributed systems.