My understanding is that Zookeeper is often used to solve the problem of "keeping track of which node plays a particular role" in a distributed system (e.g. master node in a DB or in a MapReduce cluster, etc).
For simplicity, say we have a DB with one master and multiple replicas and the current master node in the DB goes down. In this scenario, one would, in principle, make one of the replica nodes a new master node. At this point my understanding is:
If we didn't have Zookeeper
The application servers may not know that we have a new master node, so they would not know where to send writes unless we have some custom logic on the app server itself to detect / correct this problem.
If we have Zookeeper
Zookeeper would somehow detect this failure, and update the value for the corresponding master key. Moreover, application servers can (optionally?) register hooks in Zookeeper, so Zookeeper can notify them of this failure, so that the app servers can update (e.g. in memory), which DB node is the new master.
My questions are:
- How does Zookeper know what node to make master? Is Zookeper responsible for this choice?
- How is this information propagated to nodes that need to interact with Zookeeper? E.g. If one of the Zookeeper nodes go down, how would the application servers know which Zookeeper node to hit in this scenario? Does Zookeeper manage this differently from competing solutions like e.g. etcd?
