I've got a situation where I essentially need dynamic cluster membership, which has been talked about in ZOOKEEPER-107 but doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon.
For now, I'm planning on working around this by having a simple coordinator service on the server nodes that will re-write the configs and bounce the servers when membership changes. Clients will may get an error or two and need to reconnect, but that should be handled by the normal error logic. On the client side, I'd really like to dynamically update the server list w/o having to re-create the entire Zookeeper object. Looking at the code, it seems like it would be pretty trivial to add "RemoveServer()/AddServer()" functions for Zookeeper that calls down to ClientCnxn, where they are just maintained in a list. Of course if the server being removed is the one currently connected, we'd need to disconnect, but a simple call to disconnect() seems like it would resolve that and trigger the automatic re-connection logic. Does anyone see an issue with that approach? Were I to create the patch, do you think it would be interesting enough to merge? It seems like that functionality will eventually be needed for whatever full dynamic server support is eventually implemented. -Dave Wright
