Dell’s Crowbar plugin for Apache Hadoop wasn’t the only new Hadoop tool open sourced by a major company yesterday. Netflix released Curator, a set of libraries for working with Apache ZooKeeper. Zookeeper is a coordinator for distributed applications such as Hadoop. It’s part of BigTop, the Hadoop distribution that includes the “extended family” of Hadoop tools.

Netflix describes Curator as a “ZooKeeper keeper.” Its features include:

curator-client – A replacement for the bundled ZooKeeper class that takes care of some low-level housekeeping and provides some useful utilities
curator-framework – The Curator Framework is a high-level API that greatly simplifies using ZooKeeper. It adds many features that build on ZooKeeper and handles the complexity of managing connections to the ZooKeeper cluster and retrying operations.
curator-recipes – Implementations of some of the common ZooKeeper “recipes”. The implementations are built on top of the Curator Framework.

A new version of ZooKeeper was just released last week.

Netflix is a big user and supporter of open source technology such as Apache Cassandra and Hadoop. The company has a few more open source tools in the pipeline:

• Astyanax – The Netflix Cassandra Client
• Priam – Co-Process for backup/recovery, Token Management, and Centralized Configuration management for Cassandra
• CassJMeter – JMeter plugin to run cassandra tests

Keep an eye on the Netflix GitHub.

Now if only Netflix would make its Chrome extension available to non-ChromeOS users so that Linux users can watch its streaming service…

(Hat tip: MyNoSQL)