There are a number of alternatives to ZooKeeper (etcd, Consul, etc). There are a number of systems which specifically require ZooKeeper (Kafka springs to mind).
How plausible would it be to replace hard dependencies on ZooKeeper with a dependency which could be fulfilled by any of the alternatives?
For example, could there be a standard protocol? Could someone implement the ZooKeeper protocol on top of Consul? Could we define a local client API with pluggable implementations for each alternative (like ODBC etc)?
Or are the semantics of the 'alternatives' just too different?
Oh, I'd love to have something similar, running etcd (for Kubernetes) and ZooKeeper (for the rest of the services) can be a PITA, and it feels like an unnecessary duplication of infrastructure.
The problem is that alternatives to ZooKeeper, like etcd or Consul, are too different.
They do solve similar problems, but their interface and their operational side is different. This would require some major work for the current ZooKeeper users.
As far as I know, there is no current system that tries to implement the same interface as ZooKeeper so that you could just plug it in wherever ZK is expected.
How plausible would it be to replace hard dependencies on ZooKeeper with a dependency which could be fulfilled by any of the alternatives?
For example, could there be a standard protocol? Could someone implement the ZooKeeper protocol on top of Consul? Could we define a local client API with pluggable implementations for each alternative (like ODBC etc)?
Or are the semantics of the 'alternatives' just too different?