As defined by the ZooKeeper wiki, ZooKeeper allows distributed processes to coordinate with each other through a shared hierarchical namespace of data registers. The namespace looks quite similar to a Unix filesystem. The data registers are known as znodes in the ZooKeeper nomenclature. You can see examples of znodes in the following image:
A ZooKeeper's hierarchical namespace
Here, you can see that znodes are organized hierarchically, much like a tree, as a standard filesystem. Some important points to take note of are as follows:
The root node has one child znode called /zoo, which in turn has three znodes.
Every znode in the ZooKeeper tree is identified by a path, and the path elements are separated by /.
The znodes are called data registers because they can store data. Thus, a znode can have children as well as data associated with it. It's analogous to having a filesystem that allows a file to also be a path.
The data in a znode is typically stored in a byte format...