Full disclosure, I'm a HashiCorp employee, but another system to look at is Consul: http://www.consul.io http://www.consul.io. It is compared to ZooKeeper more

Full disclosure, I'm a HashiCorp employee, but another system to look at is Consul: http://www.consul.io http://www.consul.io. It is compared to ZooKeeper more extensively here: http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/zookeeper.html http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/zookeeper.html. At a high level, ZooKeeper gives you a low-level distributed primitives. While these are all you need to build leader election, service discovery, monitoring, etc, it does require you to actually build that all yourself. Consul goes the route of providing high-level features instead of low-level primitives (although they are all there, and usable via an HTTP API). It makes it easy as an operations person to deploy, and just as easy as an app developer to integrate and use.