Hi my name is Lance Co Ting Keh and I work at Box. You guys did a tremendous job with Helix. We are looking to use it to manage a cluster primarily running Node.js. Our model for using Helix would be to have node.js or some other non-JVM library be *Participants*, a router as a * Spectator* and another set of machines to serve as the *Controllers *(pending testing we may just run master-slave controllers on the same instances as the Participants) . The participants will be interacting with Zookeeper in two ways, one is to receive helix state transition messages through the instance of the HelixManager <Participant>, and another is to directly interact with Zookeeper just to maintain ephemeral nodes within /INSTANCES. Maintaining ephemeral nodes directly to Zookeeper would be done instead of using InstanceConfig and calling addInstance on HelixAdmin because of the basic health checking baked into maintaining ephemeral nodes. If not we would then have to write a health checker from Node.js and the JVM running the Participant. Are there better alternatives for non-JVM Helix participants? I corresponded with Kishore briefly and he mentioned HelixAgents specifically ProcessMonitorThread that came out in the last release.
Thank you very much! Lance Co Ting Keh
