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. Serf is first and foremost a library with a command-line interface, serf. The Serf library is independent of the command line agent, serf. The serf binary is located under cmd/serf and can be installed stand alone by issuing the command go get -u github.com/hashicorp/serf/cmd/serf.
Features
- 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
- Full, comprehensive documentation is viewable on the Serf website