Description |
Serf is a decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration that is lightweight, highly available, and fault tolerant.
Serf runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. An efficient and lightweight gossip protocol is used to communicate with other nodes. Serf can detect node failures and notify the rest of the cluster. An event system is built on top of Serf, letting you use Serf's gossip protocol to propagate events such as deploys, configuration changes, etc. Serf is completely masterless with no single point of failure.
Here are some example use cases of Serf, though there are many others:
Discovering web servers and automatically adding them to a load balancer
Organizing many memcached or redis nodes into a cluster, perhaps with something like twemproxy or maybe just configuring an application with the address of all the nodes
Triggering web deploys using the event system built on top of Serf
Propagating changes to configuration to relevant nodes.
Updating DNS records to reflect cluster changes as they occur.
Much, much more.
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