Hey,
The key difference between both the components of HDFS deployment are as follows:
Automatic failover adds two new components to an HDFS deployment: a ZooKeeper quorum, and the ZKFailoverController process (abbreviated as ZKFC)
- Apache ZooKeeper is a highly available service for maintaining small amounts of coordination data, notifying clients of changes in that data, and monitoring clients for failures. The implementation of automatic HDFS failover relies on ZooKeeper for the following things:
- Failure detection: Each of the NameNode machines in the cluster maintains a persistent session in ZooKeeper. If the machine crashes, the ZooKeeper session will expire, notifying the other NameNode that a failover should be triggered.
- Active NameNode election: ZooKeeper provides a simple mechanism to exclusively elect a node as active. If the current active NameNode crashes, another node may take a special exclusive lock in ZooKeeper indicating that it should become the next active.
- The ZKFailoverController (ZKFC) is a new component which is a ZooKeeper client which also monitors and manages the state of the NameNode. Each of the machines which runs a NameNode also runs a ZKFC, and that ZKFC is responsible for:
- Health monitoring: The ZKFC pings its local NameNode on a periodic basis with a health-check command. So long as the NameNode responds in a timely fashion with a healthy status, the ZKFC considers the node healthy.
- ZooKeeper session management: When the local NameNode is healthy, the ZKFC holds a session open in ZooKeeper. If the local NameNode is active, it also holds a special "lock" znode. If the session expires, the lock node will be automatically deleted.
If the local NameNode is healthy, and the ZKFC sees that no other node currently holds the lock znode, it will itself try to acquire the lock. If it succeeds, then it has "won the election", and is responsible for running a failover to make its local NameNode active.
