Major Description
Optimizations for WAN Deployments
Possible Mentor
Henry Robinson (henry at apache dot org)
Requirements
Java, some networking familiarity
Description
ZK 3.3.0 added observers which are non-voting members of a ZK ensemble. One use case for observers is as a proxy to a remote voting ensemble, say in a different data center. Since observers do not need to vote, there are less strict latency requirements on the delivery of messages to them. WAN traffic is also expensive. This project would investigate and implement batching of messages to observers, and potential mechanisms for decreasing the number of messages that need to be sent. For example, a destructive update to a znode twice in a row does not theoretically need to be sent twice - although making this work correctly with ZAB will be a challenge.