So I have noticed that operations can still continue when zookeeper fails 1 node of it's 3 node quorum although I understand that it can no longer accept writes because it has no leader (is this right). I know we have to satisfy the ceil(N/2) requirement, but this is to chose leadership it says nothing about how the dependencies (HBase in particular) would be affected.

My questions is at it's core, what is the behavior of zookeeper when failure is seen from 3 nodes to 2. Does it turn into a read only coordinator, as an immediate fix can one be assigned master?

Thanks.