Need and Benefits of ZooKeeper

ZooKeeper is an application library that allows distributed processes to coordinate with each other. Let us see the needs and benefits of ZooKeeper as a coordination system.

Needs for ZooKeeper

1. In today's Big Data and Cloud Computing world, applications are made up of many independent programs running on many different sets of computers, and is always changing. Coordinating the actions of these programs is very  difficult, without a proper coordination system.

2. Developers may get busy in developing coordination logic, resulting in lack the time to write their application logic properly.

3. Developers may spend little time with the coordination logic and simply write a quick-and-dirty coordinator logic, resulting in fragile coordination logic which then becomes an unreliable single point of failure.

Benefits of ZooKeeper

1. ZooKeeper separates application data from control or coordination data.

2. ZooKeeper can tolerate faults and scale throughput, through an ensemble of servers, thus providing strong consistency, ordering, and durability guarantees.

3. ZooKeeper allows you to implement coordination and synchronization primitives, with ease, thus providing a simpler way to deal with many aspects of concurrency.

4. ZooKeeper implements solutions to important distributed computing problems such as message delays, processor speed, clock drift etc. and packages up these implementations in a way that is intuitive to developers.

This is just a small list. I will try to add more to the list. You may also add more to the list.