ZooKeeper - the unsung hero

Location:

Einsteinsaal

Date and time:

Mon, 2011-06-06 17:00 - 17:40

Speaker:

Thomas Koch

ZooKeeper started as an internal Yahoo project. After being released as free software to the Apache foundation it became a critical building block of well known systems like HBase, Cassandra, Neo4j and SOLR and many more lesser known but critical systems at linkedin, yahoo, facebook and rackspace. Despite being so useful and important, most people are not aware of the hard working ZooKeeper.

ZooKeeper helps you to supervise the availability of processes (heartbeat), to implement distributed locking, leader election, central configuration and reliable messaging. All this is made possible by a simple file-system like API that lets you store and update small information units in a highly available cluster of ZooKeeper servers.

The first part of the talk explains the client API and guarantees of the ZooKeeper service. The second part outlines the inner architecture of the system. The third part shows some ZooKeeper use cases in HBase, Cassandra, distributed search applications and others. The last part gives some further suggestions of applications of ZooKeeper.

The talk is aimed at experienced software developers and project managers who work (and fight) with systems that span several servers or racks of servers.

Calendar

Berlin Buzzwords 2011 is a conference for developers and users of open source software projects, focussing on the issues of scalable search, data-analysis in the cloud and NoSQL-databases. Berlin Buzzwords presents more than 30 talks and presentations of international speakers specific to the three tags "search", "store" and "scale".