I've been looking at Zookeeper recently and wondered how it compares with a hardware loadbalancer for the following usecases:
1) Service discovery - Using ZooKeeper, the server would register itself on a common znode which can be looked up by the client to get a list of registered servers. - Using H/W loadbalancer, I can have couple of server IPs behind a VIP name and the client is only aware of the VIP address. 2) Load balancing - Using ZooKeeper, the load-balancing happens at the client side. ( connection is directly made from the client to the server ) - Using H/W LB, the load-balancing happens at the load-balancer side ( and hence the connection is routed via LB) So for the above 2 usescase, are there any specific advantages in using ZooKeeper over a H/W load-balancer?
