LinkedIn Re-Architects Service Discovery: Replacing Zookeeper with Kafka and xDS at Scale

LinkedIn's engineering team successfully upgraded its legacy ZooKeeper service discovery platform to enhance scalability and performance. By leveraging Apache Kafka and the xDS protocol, the new architecture enables eventual consistency, supports multiple languages, and allows migration without downtime. Post-upgrade, latency vastly improved, facilitating hundreds of thousands of app instances. By Patrick Farry