[ZOOKEEPER-3140] Allow Followers to host Observers

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 3.6.0
• Fix Version/s: 3.6.0
• Component/s: server
• Labels: pull-request-available
• Assignee: Brian Nixon
• Reporter: Brian Nixon
• Created: 07/Sep/18 23:28
• Updated: 22/Apr/21 05:30
• Resolved: 09/Dec/18 02:17

Description

Observers function simple as non-voting members of the ensemble, sharing the Learner interface with Followers and holding only a slightly difference internal pipeline. Both maintain connections along the quorum port with the Leader by which they learn of all new proposals on the ensemble.

There are benefits to allowing Observers to connect to the Followers to plug into the commit stream in addition to connecting to the Leader. It shifts the burden of supporting Observers off the Leader and allow it to focus on coordinating the commit of writes. This means better performance when the Leader is under high load, particularly high network load such as can happen after a leader election when many Learners need to sync. It also reduces the total network connections maintained on the Leader when there are a high number of observers. One the other end, Observer availability is improved since it will take shorter time for a high number of Observers to finish syncing and start serving client traffic.

The current implementation only supports scaling the number of Observers into the hundreds before performance begins to degrade. By opening up Followers to also host Observers, over a thousand observers can be hosted on a typical ensemble without major negative impact under both normal operation and during post-leader election sync.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #628