zookeeper initial discovery

Question

I want to use Apache Zookeeper (or Curator) as a replicated naming service. Let's say I run 3 zookeeper servers and I have a dozen of computers with different applications which can connect to these servers.

How should I communicate zookeeper IP addresses to clients? A configuration file which should be distributed manually to each machine?

Corba Naming service had an option of UDP broadcast discovery in which case no configuration file is needed. Is there a similar possibility in Zookeeper?

Answer 1

It depends where/how you are deploying. If this is at AWS you can use Route 53 or elastic IPs. In general, the solution is some kind of DNS. i.e. a well known hostname for each of the ZK instances.

If you use something like Exhibitor (disclaimer, I wrote it) it's easier in that Exhibitor can work with Apache Curator to provide up-to-date cluster information.