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  159. <h1>ZooKeeper Recipes and Solutions</h1>
  160. <div id="minitoc-area">
  161. <ul class="minitoc">
  162. <li>
  163. <a href="#ch_recipes">A Guide to Creating Higher-level Constructs with ZooKeeper</a>
  164. <ul class="minitoc">
  165. <li>
  166. <a href="#sc_outOfTheBox">Out of the Box Applications: Name Service, Configuration, Group
  167. Membership</a>
  168. </li>
  169. <li>
  170. <a href="#sc_recipes_eventHandles">Barriers</a>
  171. <ul class="minitoc">
  172. <li>
  173. <a href="#sc_doubleBarriers">Double Barriers</a>
  174. </li>
  175. </ul>
  176. </li>
  177. <li>
  178. <a href="#sc_recipes_Queues">Queues</a>
  179. <ul class="minitoc">
  180. <li>
  181. <a href="#sc_recipes_priorityQueues">Priority Queues</a>
  182. </li>
  183. </ul>
  184. </li>
  185. <li>
  186. <a href="#sc_recipes_Locks">Locks</a>
  187. <ul class="minitoc">
  188. <li>
  189. <a href="#Shared+Locks">Shared Locks</a>
  190. </li>
  191. <li>
  192. <a href="#sc_recoverableSharedLocks">Recoverable Shared Locks</a>
  193. </li>
  194. </ul>
  195. </li>
  196. <li>
  197. <a href="#sc_recipes_twoPhasedCommit">Two-phased Commit</a>
  198. </li>
  199. <li>
  200. <a href="#sc_leaderElection">Leader Election</a>
  201. </li>
  202. </ul>
  203. </li>
  204. </ul>
  205. </div>
  206. <a name="N10009"></a><a name="ch_recipes"></a>
  207. <h2 class="h3">A Guide to Creating Higher-level Constructs with ZooKeeper</h2>
  208. <div class="section">
  209. <p>In this article, you'll find guidelines for using
  210. ZooKeeper to implement higher order functions. All of them are conventions
  211. implemented at the client and do not require special support from
  212. ZooKeeper. Hopfully the community will capture these conventions in client-side libraries
  213. to ease their use and to encourage standardization.</p>
  214. <p>One of the most interesting things about ZooKeeper is that even
  215. though ZooKeeper uses <em>asynchronous</em> notifications, you
  216. can use it to build <em>synchronous</em> consistency
  217. primitives, such as queues and locks. As you will see, this is possible
  218. because ZooKeeper imposes an overall order on updates, and has mechanisms
  219. to expose this ordering.</p>
  220. <p>Note that the recipes below attempt to employ best practices. In
  221. particular, they avoid polling, timers or anything else that would result
  222. in a "herd effect", causing bursts of traffic and limiting
  223. scalability.</p>
  224. <p>There are many useful functions that can be imagined that aren't
  225. included here - revocable read-write priority locks, as just one example.
  226. And some of the constructs mentioned here - locks, in particular -
  227. illustrate certain points, even though you may find other constructs, such
  228. as event handles or queues, a more practical means of performing the same
  229. function. In general, the examples in this section are designed to
  230. stimulate thought.</p>
  231. <a name="N10021"></a><a name="sc_outOfTheBox"></a>
  232. <h3 class="h4">Out of the Box Applications: Name Service, Configuration, Group
  233. Membership</h3>
  234. <p>Name service and configuration are two of the primary applications
  235. of ZooKeeper. These two functions are provided directly by the ZooKeeper
  236. API.</p>
  237. <p>Another function directly provided by ZooKeeper is <em>group
  238. membership</em>. The group is represented by a node. Members of the
  239. group create ephemeral nodes under the group node. Nodes of the members
  240. that fail abnormally will be removed automatically when ZooKeeper detects
  241. the failure.</p>
  242. <a name="N10031"></a><a name="sc_recipes_eventHandles"></a>
  243. <h3 class="h4">Barriers</h3>
  244. <p>Distributed systems use <em>barriers</em>
  245. to block processing of a set of nodes until a condition is met
  246. at which time all the nodes are allowed to proceed. Barriers are
  247. implemented in ZooKeeper by designating a barrier node. The
  248. barrier is in place if the barrier node exists. Here's the
  249. pseudo code:</p>
  250. <ol>
  251. <li>
  252. <p>Client calls the ZooKeeper API's <strong>exists()</strong> function on the barrier node, with
  253. <em>watch</em> set to true.</p>
  254. </li>
  255. <li>
  256. <p>If <strong>exists()</strong> returns false, the
  257. barrier is gone and the client proceeds</p>
  258. </li>
  259. <li>
  260. <p>Else, if <strong>exists()</strong> returns true,
  261. the clients wait for a watch event from ZooKeeper for the barrier
  262. node.</p>
  263. </li>
  264. <li>
  265. <p>When the watch event is triggered, the client reissues the
  266. <strong>exists( )</strong> call, again waiting until
  267. the barrier node is removed.</p>
  268. </li>
  269. </ol>
  270. <a name="N10067"></a><a name="sc_doubleBarriers"></a>
  271. <h4>Double Barriers</h4>
  272. <p>Double barriers enable clients to synchronize the beginning and
  273. the end of a computation. When enough processes have joined the barrier,
  274. processes start their computation and leave the barrier once they have
  275. finished. This recipe shows how to use a ZooKeeper node as a
  276. barrier.</p>
  277. <p>The pseudo code in this recipe represents the barrier node as
  278. <em>b</em>. Every client process <em>p</em>
  279. registers with the barrier node on entry and unregisters when it is
  280. ready to leave. A node registers with the barrier node via the <strong>Enter</strong> procedure below, it waits until
  281. <em>x</em> client process register before proceeding with
  282. the computation. (The <em>x</em> here is up to you to
  283. determine for your system.)</p>
  284. <table class="ForrestTable" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="4">
  285. <tr>
  286. <td><strong>Enter</strong></td>
  287. <td><strong>Leave</strong></td>
  288. </tr>
  289. <tr>
  290. <td>
  291. <ol>
  292. <li>
  293. <p>Create a name <em><em>n</em> =
  294. <em>b</em>+&ldquo;/&rdquo;+<em>p</em></em>
  295. </p>
  296. </li>
  297. <li>
  298. <p>Set watch: <strong>exists(<em>b</em> + &lsquo;&lsquo;/ready&rsquo;&rsquo;,
  299. true)</strong>
  300. </p>
  301. </li>
  302. <li>
  303. <p>Create child: <strong>create(
  304. <em>n</em>, EPHEMERAL)</strong>
  305. </p>
  306. </li>
  307. <li>
  308. <p>
  309. <strong>L = getChildren(b,
  310. false)</strong>
  311. </p>
  312. </li>
  313. <li>
  314. <p>if fewer children in L than<em>
  315. x</em>, wait for watch event</p>
  316. </li>
  317. <li>
  318. <p>else <strong>create(b + &lsquo;&lsquo;/ready&rsquo;&rsquo;,
  319. REGULAR)</strong>
  320. </p>
  321. </li>
  322. </ol>
  323. </td>
  324. <td>
  325. <ol>
  326. <li>
  327. <p>
  328. <strong>L = getChildren(b,
  329. false)</strong>
  330. </p>
  331. </li>
  332. <li>
  333. <p>if no children, exit</p>
  334. </li>
  335. <li>
  336. <p>if <em>p</em> is only process node in
  337. L, delete(n) and exit</p>
  338. </li>
  339. <li>
  340. <p>if <em>p</em> is the lowest process
  341. node in L, wait on highest process node in P</p>
  342. </li>
  343. <li>
  344. <p>else <strong>delete(<em>n</em>) </strong>if
  345. still exists and wait on lowest process node in L</p>
  346. </li>
  347. <li>
  348. <p>goto 1</p>
  349. </li>
  350. </ol>
  351. </td>
  352. </tr>
  353. </table>
  354. <p>On entering, all processes watch on a ready node and
  355. create an ephemeral node as a child of the barrier node. Each process
  356. but the last enters the barrier and waits for the ready node to appear
  357. at line 5. The process that creates the xth node, the last process, will
  358. see x nodes in the list of children and create the ready node, waking up
  359. the other processes. Note that waiting processes wake up only when it is
  360. time to exit, so waiting is efficient.
  361. </p>
  362. <p>On exit, you can't use a flag such as <em>ready</em>
  363. because you are watching for process nodes to go away. By using
  364. ephemeral nodes, processes that fail after the barrier has been entered
  365. do not prevent correct processes from finishing. When processes are
  366. ready to leave, they need to delete their process nodes and wait for all
  367. other processes to do the same.</p>
  368. <p>Processes exit when there are no process nodes left as children of
  369. <em>b</em>. However, as an efficiency, you can use the
  370. lowest process node as the ready flag. All other processes that are
  371. ready to exit watch for the lowest existing process node to go away, and
  372. the owner of the lowest process watches for any other process node
  373. (picking the highest for simplicity) to go away. This means that only a
  374. single process wakes up on each node deletion except for the last node,
  375. which wakes up everyone when it is removed.</p>
  376. <a name="N1011A"></a><a name="sc_recipes_Queues"></a>
  377. <h3 class="h4">Queues</h3>
  378. <p>Distributed queues are a common data structure. To implement a
  379. distributed queue in ZooKeeper, first designate a znode to hold the queue,
  380. the queue node. The distributed clients put something into the queue by
  381. calling create() with a pathname ending in "queue-", with the
  382. <em>sequence</em> and <em>ephemeral</em> flags in
  383. the create() call set to true. Because the <em>sequence</em>
  384. flag is set, the new pathnames will have the form
  385. _path-to-queue-node_/queue-X, where X is a monotonic increasing number. A
  386. client that wants to be remove from the queue calls ZooKeeper's <strong>getChildren( )</strong> function, with
  387. <em>watch</em> set to true on the queue node, and begins
  388. processing nodes with the lowest number. The client does not need to issue
  389. another <strong>getChildren( )</strong> until it exhausts
  390. the list obtained from the first <strong>getChildren(
  391. )</strong> call. If there are are no children in the queue node, the
  392. reader waits for a watch notification to check to queue again.</p>
  393. <a name="N10138"></a><a name="sc_recipes_priorityQueues"></a>
  394. <h4>Priority Queues</h4>
  395. <p>To implement a priority queue, you need only make two simple
  396. changes to the generic <a href="#sc_recipes_Queues">queue
  397. recipe</a> . First, to add to a queue, the pathname ends with
  398. "queue-YY" where YY is the priority of the element with lower numbers
  399. representing higher priority (just like UNIX). Second, when removing
  400. from the queue a client uses an up-to-date children list meaning that
  401. the client will invalidate previously obtained children lists if a watch
  402. notification triggers for the queue node.</p>
  403. <a name="N10147"></a><a name="sc_recipes_Locks"></a>
  404. <h3 class="h4">Locks</h3>
  405. <p>Fully distributed locks that are globally synchronous, meaning at
  406. any snapshot in time no two clients think they hold the same lock. These
  407. can be implemented using ZooKeeeper. As with priority queues, first define
  408. a lock node.</p>
  409. <p>Clients wishing to obtain a lock do the following:</p>
  410. <ol>
  411. <li>
  412. <p>Call <strong>create( )</strong> with a pathname
  413. of "_locknode_/lock-" and the <em>sequence</em> and
  414. <em>ephemeral</em> flags set.</p>
  415. </li>
  416. <li>
  417. <p>Call <strong>getChildren( )</strong> on the lock
  418. node <em>without</em> setting the watch flag (this is
  419. important to avoid the herd effect).</p>
  420. </li>
  421. <li>
  422. <p>If the pathname created in step <strong>1</strong> has the lowest sequence number suffix, the
  423. client has the lock and the client exits the protocol.</p>
  424. </li>
  425. <li>
  426. <p>The client calls <strong>exists( )</strong> with
  427. the watch flag set on the path in the lock directory with the next
  428. lowest sequence number.</p>
  429. </li>
  430. <li>
  431. <p>if <strong>exists( )</strong> returns false, go
  432. to step <strong>2</strong>. Otherwise, wait for a
  433. notification for the pathname from the previous step before going to
  434. step <strong>2</strong>.</p>
  435. </li>
  436. </ol>
  437. <p>The unlock protocol is very simple: clients wishing to release a
  438. lock simply delete the node they created in step 1.</p>
  439. <p>Here are a few things to notice:</p>
  440. <ul>
  441. <li>
  442. <p>The removal of a node will only cause one client to wake up
  443. since each node is watched by exactly one client. In this way, you
  444. avoid the herd effect.</p>
  445. </li>
  446. </ul>
  447. <ul>
  448. <li>
  449. <p>There is no polling or timeouts.</p>
  450. </li>
  451. </ul>
  452. <ul>
  453. <li>
  454. <p>Because of the way you implement locking, it is easy to see the
  455. amount of lock contention, break locks, debug locking problems,
  456. etc.</p>
  457. </li>
  458. </ul>
  459. <a name="N101B3"></a><a name="Shared+Locks"></a>
  460. <h4>Shared Locks</h4>
  461. <p>You can implement shared locks by with a few changes to the lock
  462. protocol:</p>
  463. <table class="ForrestTable" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="4">
  464. <tr>
  465. <td><strong>Obtaining a read
  466. lock:</strong></td>
  467. <td><strong>Obtaining a write
  468. lock:</strong></td>
  469. </tr>
  470. <tr>
  471. <td>
  472. <ol>
  473. <li>
  474. <p>Call <strong>create( )</strong> to
  475. create a node with pathname
  476. "<span class="codefrag filename">_locknode_/read-</span>". This is the
  477. lock node use later in the protocol. Make sure to set both
  478. the <em>sequence</em> and
  479. <em>ephemeral</em> flags.</p>
  480. </li>
  481. <li>
  482. <p>Call <strong>getChildren( )</strong>
  483. on the lock node <em>without</em> setting the
  484. <em>watch</em> flag - this is important, as it
  485. avoids the herd effect.</p>
  486. </li>
  487. <li>
  488. <p>If there are no children with a pathname starting
  489. with "<span class="codefrag filename">write-</span>" and having a lower
  490. sequence number than the node created in step <strong>1</strong>, the client has the lock and can
  491. exit the protocol. </p>
  492. </li>
  493. <li>
  494. <p>Otherwise, call <strong>exists(
  495. )</strong>, with <em>watch</em> flag, set on
  496. the node in lock directory with pathname staring with
  497. "<span class="codefrag filename">write-</span>" having the next lowest
  498. sequence number.</p>
  499. </li>
  500. <li>
  501. <p>If <strong>exists( )</strong>
  502. returns <em>false</em>, goto step <strong>2</strong>.</p>
  503. </li>
  504. <li>
  505. <p>Otherwise, wait for a notification for the pathname
  506. from the previous step before going to step <strong>2</strong>
  507. </p>
  508. </li>
  509. </ol>
  510. </td>
  511. <td>
  512. <ol>
  513. <li>
  514. <p>Call <strong>create( )</strong> to
  515. create a node with pathname
  516. "<span class="codefrag filename">_locknode_/write-</span>". This is the
  517. lock node spoken of later in the protocol. Make sure to
  518. set both <em>sequence</em> and
  519. <em>ephemeral</em> flags.</p>
  520. </li>
  521. <li>
  522. <p>Call <strong>getChildren( )
  523. </strong> on the lock node <em>without</em>
  524. setting the <em>watch</em> flag - this is
  525. important, as it avoids the herd effect.</p>
  526. </li>
  527. <li>
  528. <p>If there are no children with a lower sequence
  529. number than the node created in step <strong>1</strong>, the client has the lock and the
  530. client exits the protocol.</p>
  531. </li>
  532. <li>
  533. <p>Call <strong>exists( ),</strong>
  534. with <em>watch</em> flag set, on the node with
  535. the pathname that has the next lowest sequence
  536. number.</p>
  537. </li>
  538. <li>
  539. <p>If <strong>exists( )</strong>
  540. returns <em>false</em>, goto step <strong>2</strong>. Otherwise, wait for a
  541. notification for the pathname from the previous step
  542. before going to step <strong>2</strong>.</p>
  543. </li>
  544. </ol>
  545. </td>
  546. </tr>
  547. </table>
  548. <div class="note">
  549. <div class="label">Note</div>
  550. <div class="content">
  551. <p>It might appear that this recipe creates a herd effect:
  552. when there is a large group of clients waiting for a read
  553. lock, and all getting notified more or less simultaneously
  554. when the "<span class="codefrag filename">write-</span>" node with the lowest
  555. sequence number is deleted. In fact. that's valid behavior:
  556. as all those waiting reader clients should be released since
  557. they have the lock. The herd effect refers to releasing a
  558. "herd" when in fact only a single or a small number of
  559. machines can proceed.
  560. </p>
  561. </div>
  562. </div>
  563. <a name="N1027F"></a><a name="sc_recoverableSharedLocks"></a>
  564. <h4>Recoverable Shared Locks</h4>
  565. <p>With minor modifications to the Shared Lock protocol, you make
  566. shared locks revocable by modifying the shared lock protocol:</p>
  567. <p>In step <strong>1</strong>, of both obtain reader
  568. and writer lock protocols, call <strong>getData(
  569. )</strong> with <em>watch</em> set, immediately after the
  570. call to <strong>create( )</strong>. If the client
  571. subsequently receives notification for the node it created in step
  572. <strong>1</strong>, it does another <strong>getData( )</strong> on that node, with
  573. <em>watch</em> set and looks for the string "unlock", which
  574. signals to the client that it must release the lock. This is because,
  575. according to this shared lock protocol, you can request the client with
  576. the lock give up the lock by calling <strong>setData()
  577. </strong> on the lock node, writing "unlock" to that node.</p>
  578. <p>Note that this protocol requires the lock holder to consent to
  579. releasing the lock. Such consent is important, especially if the lock
  580. holder needs to do some processing before releasing the lock. Of course
  581. you can always implement <em>Revocable Shared Locks with Freaking
  582. Laser Beams</em> by stipulating in your protocol that the revoker
  583. is allowed to delete the lock node if after some length of time the lock
  584. isn't deleted by the lock holder.</p>
  585. <a name="N102AB"></a><a name="sc_recipes_twoPhasedCommit"></a>
  586. <h3 class="h4">Two-phased Commit</h3>
  587. <p>A two-phase commit protocol is an algorithm that lets all clients in
  588. a distributed system agree either to commit a transaction or abort.</p>
  589. <p>In ZooKeeper, you can implement a two-phased commit by having a
  590. coordinator create a transaction node, say "/app/Tx", and one child node
  591. per participating site, say "/app/Tx/s_i". When coordinator creates the
  592. child node, it leaves the content undefined. Once each site involved in
  593. the transaction receives the transaction from the coordinator, the site
  594. reads each child node and sets a watch. Each site then processes the query
  595. and votes "commit" or "abort" by writing to its respective node. Once the
  596. write completes, the other sites are notified, and as soon as all sites
  597. have all votes, they can decide either "abort" or "commit". Note that a
  598. node can decide "abort" earlier if some site votes for "abort".</p>
  599. <p>An interesting aspect of this implementation is that the only role
  600. of the coordinator is to decide upon the group of sites, to create the
  601. ZooKeeper nodes, and to propagate the transaction to the corresponding
  602. sites. In fact, even propagating the transaction can be done through
  603. ZooKeeper by writing it in the transaction node.</p>
  604. <p>There are two important drawbacks of the approach described above.
  605. One is the message complexity, which is O(n&sup2;). The second is the
  606. impossibility of detecting failures of sites through ephemeral nodes. To
  607. detect the failure of a site using ephemeral nodes, it is necessary that
  608. the site create the node.</p>
  609. <p>To solve the first problem, you can have only the coordinator
  610. notified of changes to the transaction nodes, and then notify the sites
  611. once coordinator reaches a decision. Note that this approach is scalable,
  612. but it's is slower too, as it requires all communication to go through the
  613. coordinator.</p>
  614. <p>To address the second problem, you can have the coordinator
  615. propagate the transaction to the sites, and have each site creating its
  616. own ephemeral node.</p>
  617. <a name="N102C4"></a><a name="sc_leaderElection"></a>
  618. <h3 class="h4">Leader Election</h3>
  619. <p>A simple way of doing leader election with ZooKeeper is to use the
  620. <strong>SEQUENCE|EPHEMERAL</strong> flags when creating
  621. znodes that represent "proposals" of clients. The idea is to have a znode,
  622. say "/election", such that each znode creates a child znode "/election/n_"
  623. with both flags SEQUENCE|EPHEMERAL. With the sequence flag, ZooKeeper
  624. automatically appends a sequence number that is greater that any one
  625. previously appended to a child of "/election". The process that created
  626. the znode with the smallest appended sequence number is the leader.
  627. </p>
  628. <p>That's not all, though. It is important to watch for failures of the
  629. leader, so that a new client arises as the new leader in the case the
  630. current leader fails. A trivial solution is to have all application
  631. processes watching upon the current smallest znode, and checking if they
  632. are the new leader when the smallest znode goes away (note that the
  633. smallest znode will go away if the leader fails because the node is
  634. ephemeral). But this causes a herd effect: upon of failure of the current
  635. leader, all other processes receive a notification, and execute
  636. getChildren on "/election" to obtain the current list of children of
  637. "/election". If the number of clients is large, it causes a spike on the
  638. number of operations that ZooKeeper servers have to process. To avoid the
  639. herd effect, it is sufficient to watch for the next znode down on the
  640. sequence of znodes. If a client receives a notification that the znode it
  641. is watching is gone, then it becomes the new leader in the case that there
  642. is no smaller znode. Note that this avoids the herd effect by not having
  643. all clients watching the same znode. </p>
  644. <p>Here's the pseudo code:</p>
  645. <p>Let ELECTION be a path of choice of the application. To volunteer to
  646. be a leader: </p>
  647. <ol>
  648. <li>
  649. <p>Create znode z with path "ELECTION/n_" with both SEQUENCE and
  650. EPHEMERAL flags;</p>
  651. </li>
  652. <li>
  653. <p>Let C be the children of "ELECTION", and i be the sequence
  654. number of z;</p>
  655. </li>
  656. <li>
  657. <p>Watch for changes on "ELECTION/n_j", where j is the smallest
  658. sequence number such that j &lt; i and n_j is a znode in C;</p>
  659. </li>
  660. </ol>
  661. <p>Upon receiving a notification of znode deletion: </p>
  662. <ol>
  663. <li>
  664. <p>Let C be the new set of children of ELECTION; </p>
  665. </li>
  666. <li>
  667. <p>If z is the smallest node in C, then execute leader
  668. procedure;</p>
  669. </li>
  670. <li>
  671. <p>Otherwise, watch for changes on "ELECTION/n_j", where j is the
  672. smallest sequence number such that j &lt; i and n_j is a znode in C;
  673. </p>
  674. </li>
  675. </ol>
  676. <p>Note that the znode having no preceding znode on the list of
  677. children does not imply that the creator of this znode is aware that it is
  678. the current leader. Applications may consider creating a separate to znode
  679. to acknowledge that the leader has executed the leader procedure. </p>
  680. </div>
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