Observers
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Key: ZOOKEEPER-368
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ZOOKEEPER-368
Project: Zookeeper
Issue Type: New Feature
Components: quorum
Reporter: Flavio Paiva Junqueira
Currently, all servers of an ensemble participate actively in reaching
agreement on the order of ZooKeeper transactions. That is, all followers
receive proposals, acknowledge them, and receive commit messages from the
leader. A leader issues commit messages once it receives acknowledgments from a
quorum of followers. For cross-colo operation, it would be useful to have a
third role: observer. Using Paxos terminology, observers are similar to
learners. An observer does not participate actively in the agreement step of
the atomic broadcast protocol. Instead, it only commits proposals that have
been accepted by some quorum of followers.
One simple solution to implement observers is to have the leader forwarding
commit messages not only to followers but also to observers, and have observers
applying transactions according to the order followers agreed upon. In the
current implementation of the protocol, however, commit messages do not carry
their corresponding transaction payload because all servers different from the
leader are followers and followers receive such a payload first through a
proposal message. Just forwarding commit messages as they currently are to an
observer consequently is not sufficient. We have a couple of options:
1- Include the transaction payload along in commit messages to observers;
2- Send proposals to observers as well.
Number 2 is simpler to implement because it doesn't require changing the
protocol implementation, but it increases traffic slightly. The performance
impact due to such an increase might be insignificant, though.
For scalability purposes, we may consider having followers also forwarding
commit messages to observers. With this option, observers can connect to
followers, and receive messages from followers. This choice is important to
avoid increasing the load on the leader with the number of observers.
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