We evaluated ZooKeeper and etcd for coordination needs across distributed systems.
Criteria:
- Consistency under partition
- Ease of use and tooling
- Integration with service discovery
Findings:
- ZooKeeper has strong consistency, mature support (Curator)
- etcd is lighter, easier to work with for modern stacks
- etcd’s gRPC/HTTP API = big win
We eventually chose etcd for its simplicity, but ZooKeeper still shines in legacy-heavy environments.