What problems does a zookeeper primarily address?

The main issues addressed by Zookeeper are:

1. Distributed coordination: Zookeeper offers a reliable distributed coordination service for coordinating and synchronizing operations in large distributed systems. It can track the status and location of individual nodes and provide a consistent view of the data.
2. Distributed locking: Zookeeper allows for the creation and management of distributed locks, ensuring the ability to achieve mutual exclusion when accessing shared resources among multiple nodes. This is crucial for applications that require data consistency and need to avoid race conditions.
3. Configuration management: Zookeeper can be used for centrally managing and distributing application configuration information. It offers a reliable mechanism for storing and updating configurations, allowing applications to dynamically respond to changes without needing to restart.
4. Naming service: Zookeeper can be used as a naming service to store and manage the namespace of nodes. It allows applications to dynamically register or discover nodes, and provides an easy-to-use interface to manage the hierarchy of nodes.
5. Distributed queue: Zookeeper allows for the creation and management of distributed queues, enabling message passing between multiple nodes. This is particularly beneficial for applications requiring task scheduling and message delivery.

In summary, Zookeeper solves issues such as coordination, synchronization, locking, configuration management, naming services, and queues in distributed systems, offering a reliable distributed coordination service.