LinkedIn Upgrades Service Discovery by Replacing ZooKeeper with Kafka and xDS
DATA AND AI INFRASTRUCTURE
LinkedIn has upgraded its service discovery platform by replacing the legacy ZooKeeper system with Apache Kafka for writes and the xDS protocol for reads. This new architecture addresses past scalability issues and is designed for improved performance and availability. A 'Dual Mode' strategy ensures zero-downtime migration, while the new system can handle 40k client streams and 10k updates per second with independent operations across data centers.

Feb 6, 2026, 6:18 AM