How the Components Work Together

Zookeeper is used to coordinate shared state information for members of distributed systems. Region servers and the active HMaster connect with a session to ZooKeeper. The ZooKeeper maintains ephemeral nodes for active sessions via heartbeats.

Each Region Server creates an ephemeral node. The HMaster monitors these nodes to discover available region servers, and it also monitors these nodes for server failures. HMasters vie to create an ephemeral node. Zookeeper determines the first one and uses it to make sure that only one master is active. The active HMaster sends heartbeats to Zookeeper, and the inactive HMaster listens for notifications of the active HMaster failure.

If a region server or the active HMaster fails to send a heartbeat, the session is expired and the corresponding ephemeral node is deleted. Listeners for updates will be notified of the deleted nodes. The active HMaster listens for region servers, and will recover region servers on failure. The Inactive HMaster listens for active HMaster failure, and if an active HMaster fails, the inactive HMaster becomes active.