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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-10296?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13866125#comment-13866125
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Andrew Purtell commented on HBASE-10296:
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Use of ZK has issues but what we had before was much worse. We had heartbeating
and partially desynchronized state in a bunch of places. Rather than implement
our own consensus protocol we used the specialist component ZK. Engineering
distributed consensus protocols is a long term endeavor full of corner cases
and hard to debug problems. It is worth consideration, but maybe only as a last
resort. Does something about our use of ZK or ZK itself have fatal issues?
> Replace ZK with a paxos running within master processes to provide better
> master failover performance and state consistency
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: HBASE-10296
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-10296
> Project: HBase
> Issue Type: Brainstorming
> Components: master, Region Assignment, regionserver
> Reporter: Feng Honghua
>
> Currently master relies on ZK to elect active master, monitor liveness and
> store almost all of its states, such as region states, table info,
> replication info and so on. And zk also plays as a channel for
> master-regionserver communication(such as in region assigning) and
> client-regionserver communication(such as replication state/behavior change).
> But zk as a communication channel is fragile due to its one-time watch and
> asynchronous notification mechanism which together can leads to missed
> events(hence missed messages), for example the master must rely on the state
> transition logic's idempotence to maintain the region assigning state
> machine's correctness, actually almost all of the most tricky inconsistency
> issues can trace back their root cause to the fragility of zk as a
> communication channel.
> Replace zk with paxos running within master processes have following benefits:
> 1. better master failover performance: all master, either the active or the
> standby ones, have the same latest states in memory(except lag ones but which
> can eventually catch up later on). whenever the active master dies, the newly
> elected active master can immediately play its role without such failover
> work as building its in-memory states by consulting meta-table and zk.
> 2. better state consistency: master's in-memory states are the only truth
> about the system,which can eliminate inconsistency from the very beginning.
> and though the states are contained by all masters, paxos guarantees they are
> identical at any time.
> 3. more direct and simple communication pattern: client changes state by
> sending requests to master, master and regionserver talk directly to each
> other by sending request and response...all don't bother to using a
> third-party storage like zk which can introduce more uncertainty, worse
> latency and more complexity.
> 4. zk can only be used as liveness monitoring for determining if a
> regionserver is dead, and later on we can eliminate zk totally when we build
> heartbeat between master and regionserver.
> I know this might looks like a very crazy re-architect, but it deserves deep
> thinking and serious discussion for it, right?
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