Charith Wickramaarachchi

Apache Zookeeper is an Open source framework which can be used for distributed coordination. To understand what Apache zookeeper does we will have to go back to the Concurrent Programming class we did at university. Think how we tried to do coordination among different Threads or processors We used global variables most of the times. Actually there are two ways to achieve coordination among processors 1) Message Passing 2) Shared Memory approach. Now lets bring that problem to the next level. How to coordinate threads /processors that are running in different machines/nodes in a distributed system. The above two approaches are still the solution for this level as well. ( Yes its a pattern in science :) ) There are lot of messaging frameworks and distributed shared memory abstractions available which can be used to achieve distributed coordination. I'd like to think Apache zookeeper as a Coordination framework which gives a shared memory abstraction to the distributed processors