ZooKeeper: wait-free coordination for internet-scale systems

In this paper, we describe ZooKeeper, a service for coordinating processes of distributed applications. Since ZooKeeper is part of critical infrastructure, ZooKeeper aims to provide a simple and high performance kernel for building more complex coordination primitives at the client. It incorporates elements from group messaging, shared registers, and distributed lock services in a replicated, centralized service. The interface exposed by Zoo-Keeper has the wait-free aspects of shared registers with an event-driven mechanism similar to cache invalidations of distributed file systems to provide a simple, yet powerful coordination service. The ZooKeeper interface enables a high-performance service implementation.…