ZooKeeper - A Reliable, Scalable Distributed Coordination System

ZooKeeper - A Reliable, Scalable Distributed Coordination System

Abstract
ZooKeeper is a high available and reliable coordination system. Distributed applications use ZooKeeper to store and mediate updates key configuration information. ZooKeeper can be used for leader election, group membership, and configuration maintenance. In addition ZooKeeper can be used for event notification, locking, and as a priority queue mechanism. It's a sort of central nervous system for distributed systems where the role of the brain is played by the coordination service, axons are the network, processes are the monitored and controlled body parts, and events are the hormones and neurotransmitters used for messaging. Every complex distributed application needs a coordination and orchestration system of some sort, so the ZooKeeper folks at Yahoo decide to build a good one and open source it for everyone to use.

P.S. So ZooKeeper is open-source realization (from Yahoo) of "close-source" Chubby lock service (from Google).

Deep-deep-deep Google internals: Chubby

1. "The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems"

Mike Burrows, Google Inc.

Abstract
We describe our experiences with the Chubby lock service, which is intended to provide coarse-grained locking as well as reliable (though low-volume) storage for a loosely-coupled distributed system. Chubby provides an interface much like a distributed file system with advisory locks, but the design emphasis is on availability and reliability, as opposed to high performance. Many instances of the service have been used for over a year, with several of them each handling a few tens of thousands of clients concurrently. The paper describes the initial design and expected use, compares it with actual use, and explains how the design had to be modified to accommodate the differences.

OSDI'06: Seventh Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, Seattle, WA, November, 2006.

"We expected Chubby to help developers deal with coarse-grained synchronization within their systems, and in particular to deal with the problem of electing a leader from among a set of otherwise equivalent servers. For example, the Google File System [7] uses a Chubby lock to appoint a GFS master server, and Bigtable [3] uses Chubby in several ways: to elect a master, to allow the master to discover the servers it controls, and to permit clients to find the master. In addition, both GFS and Bigtable use Chubby as a well-known and available location to store a small amount of meta-data; in effect they use Chubby as the root of their distributed data structures. Some services use locks to partition work (at a coarse grain) between several servers."

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"Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective"

Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective
Tushar Chandra
Robert Griesemer
Joshua Redstone
June 20, 2007
Abstract
We describe our experience in building a fault-tolerant data-base using the Paxos consensus algorithm. Despite the existing literature in the field, building such a database proved to be non-trivial. We describe selected algorithmic and engineering problems encountered, and the solutions we found for them. Our measurements indicate that we have built a competitive system.

The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems

The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems.
Mike Burrows, Google Inc.

Abstract
We describe our experiences with the Chubby lock service, which is intended to provide coarse-grained locking as well as reliable (though low-volume) storage for a loosely-coupled distributed system. Chubby provides an interface much like a distributed file system with advisory locks, but the design emphasis is on availability and reliability, as opposed to high performance. Many instances of the service have been used for over a year, with several of them each handling a few tens of thousands of clients concurrently. The paper describes the initial design and expected use, compares it with actual use, and explains how the design had to be modified to accommodate the differences.