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It seems silly to compare these two servers considering that they're meant for very different things. But if you think about it, they can do lots of similar things: store configuration data, distributed locking, queueing, etc.

I've got an instance of Redis that I'm using for some production-related things, but would like to do some simple synchronization between servers (mostly configuration changes that don't require pushing up code and simple locking between servers). What does Zookeeper give me that Redis wouldn't?

gnat
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Jason Baker
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1 Answers1

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We use both Redis and Zookeeper at work so this is from first hand experience

Redis is fast; really, really fast. It is also immediately consistent, so it's good for fast moving data sets. The downside is that, running on one server, if it fails then you lose write access until another server takes it's place. Replacing the server is a manual operation unless you automate it yourself. (You can still get read access to your data if you configure a slave instance).

Zookeeper also features immediately consistency. It's not half as quick, but it will recover automatically (where possible) in the face of failure, so if you need continuous write access, even when your servers fail on you then you'll want to use Zookeeper.

My advice is, use zookeeper for coordination: tracking which nodes are active, leader election amongst a group, etc. Use redis for datasets that need fast writes but where the occasional outage isn't a disaster. Hit counters for web pages for example.

dan_waterworth
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