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I was currently looking into memcached as way to coordinate a group of server, but came across Apache's ZooKeeper along the way. It looks interesting, and Yahoo uses it, so it shouldn't be bad, but I'd never heard of it before, so I'm kind of skeptical. Has anyone else given it a try? Any comments or ideas?
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ZooKeeper is used for a myriad of services inside Yahoo! for doing leader election, configuration management, sharding, locking, group membership etc [1].
Apache ZooKeeper is used for maintaining centralized configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services in a simple interface so that we don't have to write it from scratch. Apache Kafka also uses ZooKeeper to manage configuration.
Although ZooKeeper provides similar functionality to the Paxos algorithm, the core consensus algorithm of ZooKeeper is not Paxos. The algorithm used in ZooKeeper is called ZAB, short for ZooKeeper Atomic Broadcast.
Elasticsearch's built-in zen discovery module handles cluster coordination. SolrCloud requires Apache Zookeeper, an additional service. In case of a shard or node failure, Elasticsearch does cluster rebalancing itself and rarely requires a manual intervention.
ZooKeeper and Memcached have different purposes. You can use memcached to do server coordination, but you'll have to do most of this work yourself. Memcached only allows coordination in that it caches common data lookups to be used by multiple clients. From reading ZooKeeper's documentation, it has a much broader focus than this. ZooKeeper seems to provide support for server clustering, which isn't the same as the cache clustering memcached provides.
Have a look at Brad Fitzpatrick's Linux Journal article on memcached to get a better idea what I mean.
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