Apache ZooKeeper is a software project of the Apache Software Foundation. It is essentially a service for distributed systems offering a hierarchical key-value store, which is used to provide a distributed configuration service, synchronization service, and naming registry for large distributed systems (see Use cases). ZooKeeper was a sub-project of Hadoop but is now a top-level Apache project in its own right. ZooKeeper's architecture supports high availability through redundant services. The clients can thus ask another ZooKeeper leader if the first fails to answer. ZooKeeper nodes store their data in a hierarchical name space, much like a file system or a tree data structure. Clients can read from and write to the nodes and in this way have a shared configuration service. ZooKeeper can be viewed as an atomic broadcast system, through which updates are totally ordered. The ZooKeeper Atomic Broadcast (ZAB) protocol is the core of the system. ZooKeeper is used by companies including Yelp, Rackspace, Yahoo!, Odnoklassniki, Reddit, NetApp SolidFire, Facebook, Twitter and eBay as well as open source enterprise search systems like Solr. ZooKeeper was originally developed at Yahoo! for streamlining the processes running on big-data clusters by storing the status in local log files on the ZooKeeper servers. These servers communicate with the client machines to provide them the information. ZooKeeper was developed in order to fix the bugs that occurred while deploying distributed big-data applications. Some of the prime features of Apache ZooKeeper are: Reliable System: This system is very reliable as it keeps working even if a node fails. Simple Architecture: The architecture of ZooKeeper is quite simple as there is a shared hierarchical namespace which helps coordinating the processes. Fast Processing: ZooKeeper is especially fast in "read-dominant" workloads (i.e. workloads in which reads are much more common than writes). Scalable: The performance of ZooKeeper can be improved by adding nodes.