Zookeeper

A zookeeper is a staff member at a zoo responsible for the daily care of animals and the operation of the facility. Duties include feeding and watering, enclosure maintenance, monitoring animal health and welfare, and providing enrichment to stimulate natural behaviors. Zookeepers work with veterinarians, researchers, and maintenance staff to ensure safety for animals and visitors. Training commonly involves a degree or certificate in zoology, animal science, or a related field, along with hands-on apprenticeship and certifications in animal handling and safety. Work often includes early mornings, long shifts, lifting, and exposure to zoonotic risks. Ethical considerations include welfare standards, enrichment programs, species-specific housing, and conservation education.

Apache ZooKeeper is an open-source distributed coordination service designed to maintain configuration information, naming, and synchronization for large distributed systems. It provides a hierarchical namespace of znodes and supports watches that notify clients of changes. ZooKeeper is designed to be highly available and reliable, running as an ensemble of servers with leader election and quorum guarantees. It is primarily intended for small, evolving configuration data and coordination tasks rather than general data storage or computation. The project originated at Yahoo and is now a top-level Apache project; implementations exist primarily in Java with client libraries in several languages. It is used by various data-processing and messaging systems to implement coordination primitives such as configuration management, distributed locks, and barrier synchronization.