Apache ZooKeeper has become an indispensable component for many distributed systems: Apache Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Apache Kafka, Apache HBase, etc. all use ZooKeeper in some form or the other. I’ve written code that interacts with ZooKeeper and I’m a big fan of the simple APIs and powerful guarantees it provides.
I had a vague idea of the broadcast protocol that powers ZooKeeper but wasn’t awake of the details. So this weekend I decided to read a short paper that gives an overview of Zab (a more detailed description of Zab can be found in “Zab: High-performance broadcast for primary-backup systems” by Flavio P. Junqueira, Benjamin C. Reed, and Marco Serafini).
The title of the paper is extremely accurate – Zab is a very simple protocol that is intuitive and easy to understand. The paper does a great job of explaining the core concepts of the algorithm to the reader. I particularly liked section 3, which includes a comparison between Zab and Paxos. Section 4 is probably the most important section of the paper and is very well written. The figures illustrating the two main failure scenarios are a nice touch.
Next step – read the detailed Zab paper.
Karan Parikh 