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Doozer

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What Is It?

Doozer is a highly-available, completely consistent store for small amounts of extremely important data. When the data changes, it can notify connected clients immediately (no polling), making it ideal for infrequently-updated data for which clients want real-time updates. Doozer is good for name service, database master elections, and configuration data shared between several machines. See When Should I Use It?, below, for details.

See the mailing list to discuss doozer with other users and developers.

Quick Start

  1. Download doozerd

  2. Unpack the archive and put doozerd in your PATH

  3. Repeat for doozer

  4. Start a doozerd with a WebView listening on :8080

     $ doozerd -w ":8080"

  5. Set a key and read it back

     $ echo "hello, world" | doozer add /message
 $ doozer get /message
 hello, world

  6. Open http://localhost:8080 and see your message

doozer web view

How Does It Work?

Doozer is a network service. A handful of machines (usually three, five, or seven) each run one doozer server process. These processes communicate with each other using a standard fully-consistent distributed consensus algorithm. Clients dial in to one or more of the doozer servers, issue commands, such as GET, SET, and WATCH, and receive responses.

(insert network diagram here)

Each doozerd process has a complete copy of the datastore and serves both read and write requests; there is no distinguished "master" or "leader". Doozer is designed to store data that fits entirely in memory; it never writes data to permanent files. A separate tool provides durable storage for backup and recovery.

When Should I Use It?

Here are some example scenarios:

  1. Name Service

    You have a set of machines that serve incoming HTTP requests. Due to hardware failure, occasionally one of these machines will fail and you replace it with a new machine at a new network address. A change to DNS data would take time to reach all clients, because the TTL of the old DNS record would cause it to remain in client caches for some time.

    Instead of DNS, you could use Doozer. Clients can subscribe to the names they are interested in, and they will get notified when any of those names’ addresses change.

  2. Database Master Election

    You are deploying a MySQL system. You want it to have high availability, so you add slaves on separate physical machines. When the master fails, you might promote one slave to become the new master. At any given time, clients need to know which machine is the master, and the slaves must coordinate with each other during failover.

    You can use doozer to store the address of the current master and all information necessary to coordinate failover.

  3. Configuration

    You have processes on several different machines, and you want them all to use the same config file, which you must occasionally update. It is important that they all use the same configuration.

    Store the config file in doozer, and have the processes read their configuration directly from doozer.

What can I do with it?

We have a detailed description of the data model.

For ways to manipulate or read the data, see the protocol spec.

Try out doozer's fault-tolerance with some fire drills.

Similar Projects

Doozer is similar to the following pieces of software:

Hacking on Doozer

License and Authors

Doozer is distributed under the terms of the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Doozer was created by Blake Mizerany and Keith Rarick. Type git shortlog -s for a full list of contributors.