Apache ZooKeeper is the coolest technology I recently came across. I found it when I was doing a research about Solr Cloud features. I got very impressed by Solr’s distributed computing. You literately have to fire a new instance and it will automatically find its place in “the cloud”. It will assign itself to a particular shards and it will make a decision to become a leader or a replica. Later you can query any of the available servers and it will find you all required data even if it’s not on that server. If some of the servers fail the service will continue to work. Very dynamic, very clever, very cool.
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