Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind sharing a bit more?
The classic problem of ZooKeeper is the client and the server upon initial startup will DNS resolve and permanently cache the IP addresses of the ZK cluster. Thus any cluster migrations require you to restart _EVERYTHING_. So running zookeeper in a dynamic environment becomes very risky. Aka AWS. Perhaps on GCE it's less dangerous, because the host migration is pretty good. There are other operational issues people h…
We run ZooKeeper (and Kafka) within Docker containers and were able to solve this problem with a patch to the client: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ZOOKEEPER-2184
You also need to disable the JVM's insane DNS-caching behavior (config change only).