AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Zookeeper: What are the differences?

Key Differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Zookeeper

1. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a highly scalable and fully managed load balancing service provided by Amazon Web Services. It distributes incoming traffic among multiple EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses, improving the availability and fault tolerance of applications.

2. Zookeeper: Apache Zookeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and group services in large distributed systems.

3. Scalability: ELB is designed to automatically scale its capacity as needed to handle traffic demands. It can handle millions of requests per second without any manual intervention. On the other hand, Zookeeper does not offer built-in scalability. Its architecture relies on a set of replicated servers, and scaling requires manual configuration and coordination.

4. Load Balancing Algorithms: ELB supports various load balancing algorithms, such as round-robin, least connections, and IP hash. These algorithms help distribute incoming traffic evenly across multiple targets. In contrast, Zookeeper does not provide load balancing algorithms as it is primarily focused on maintaining configuration information and providing synchronization services.

5. Fault Tolerance and High Availability: ELB provides fault tolerance and high availability by automatically spreading traffic across multiple availability zones and rerouting traffic in case of failures. It performs health checks on targets and directs traffic only to healthy targets. Zookeeper also offers fault tolerance through its replicated servers, ensuring data consistency and availability even in the event of server failures.

6. Use Cases: ELB is typically used in scenarios where there is a need to distribute incoming traffic to multiple backend targets, such as web applications, microservices, and API endpoints. Zookeeper, on the other hand, is primarily used for coordination, configuration management, and synchronization in distributed systems like Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Storm.

In Summary, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a fully managed load balancing service for scalable distribution of incoming traffic, while Zookeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information and providing synchronization in distributed systems.