And yet somehow they seem to have gotten it to work. I run a few Zookeeper-based systems where ZK just seems to work and I don't have to look at logging statements, either. I've never dealt with Zookeeper downtime that wasn't Amazon's fault.

So you are having ZK downtime? Such a system shouldn't ever really go down, even with Amazon problems. We strive for software in which individual nodes can be flakey or down without impacting the uptime of the whole cluster. ZK doesn't fit this criteria, as you have just stated. I prefer gossip-based Raft systems, for example (which is why I like Consul so much. We're also big Riak users).

> So you are having ZK downtime?

No, individual nodes have gone down based on hardware problems. The system stays up. Jespen has given Zookeeper probably the most ringing endorsement of anything it's tested, so I don't know what you're on about.