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Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

serfdom.io

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Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#11

Post by nwh »

mitchellh wrote: post #9

I'm jumping on a plane right now (a couple hours) but I'd be happy to answer any questions related to Serf once I land. Just leave them here and I'll give it my best shot! We've dreamt of something like Serf for quite awhile and I'm glad it is now a reality. Some recommended URLs if you're curious what the point is: "What is Serf?" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/index.html "Use Cases" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/use-cas…

You need to do some repair on the website for iOS; the front page is white text on a white background.

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#12

Post by taterbase »

lambda wrote: post #10

The title needs to be improved. "A decentralized, highly available, fault tolerant solution..." for what? The title should include "for service discovery and orchestration".

Agreed, these tag lines come off as buzzword soup instead of informative. I would love a small quick scenario describing what serf can help prevent/enable.

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#13

Post by plainOldText »

taterbase wrote: post #12
lambda wrote: post #10

The title needs to be improved. "A decentralized, highly available, fault tolerant solution..." for what? The title should include "for service discovery and orchestration".

Agreed, these tag lines come off as buzzword soup instead of informative. I would love a small quick scenario describing what serf can help prevent/enable.

You might find this useful: http://www.serfdom.io/intro/use-cases.html

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#15

Post by mitchellh »

mjohan wrote: post #14

How does security work in a system like this. If this is used in a shared hosting system, can a user inject false messages into Serf with for example PHP?

Yes, they can. In the general case its not an issue because usually your nodes are inaccessible by the public, but if you're using a shared hosting environment, this is entirely possible.

We're addressing this in the next release by signing/encrypting gossiped messages. See the roadmap: http://www.serfdom.io/docs/roadmap.html

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#16

Post by stormbrew »

mitchellh wrote: post #9

I'm jumping on a plane right now (a couple hours) but I'd be happy to answer any questions related to Serf once I land. Just leave them here and I'll give it my best shot! We've dreamt of something like Serf for quite awhile and I'm glad it is now a reality. Some recommended URLs if you're curious what the point is: "What is Serf?" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/index.html "Use Cases" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/use-cas…

The one thing that feels lacking to me, and maybe there's just something I don't get, is the ability to tag nodes with metadata. From the docs it seems like what you're expected to do is fire an event for a node to, eg., declare itself a webserver, but this seems prone to failure in the long run. If I bring a new load balancer online how does it find out what's a webserver already?

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#17

Post by linker3000 »

plainOldText wrote: post #13
taterbase wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, these tag lines come off as buzzword soup instead of informative. I would love a small quick scenario describing what serf can help prevent/enable.

You might find this useful: http://www.serfdom.io/intro/use-cases.html

Yes, that page helped me, but the front page should be the hook and it left me none the wiser.

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#18

Post by philips »

It seems serf and etcd are both trying to solve service discovery but are attacking it using different approaches. Which is pretty cool!

Serf looks to be eventually consistent and event driven. So you can figure out who is up and send events to members. This gives you a lot of utility for the use cases of propagating information to DNS, load balancers, etc.

But, you couldn't use serf for something like master election or locks and would need etcd or Zookeeper for that. Serf and etcd aren't mutually exclusive systems in any sense just solving different problems in different ways.

They have a nice write-up on the page here: http://www.serfdom.io/intro/vs-zookeeper.html

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#19

Post by armon »

stormbrew wrote: post #16
mitchellh wrote: post #9

I'm jumping on a plane right now (a couple hours) but I'd be happy to answer any questions related to Serf once I land. Just leave them here and I'll give it my best shot! We've dreamt of something like Serf for quite awhile and I'm glad it is now a reality. Some recommended URLs if you're curious what the point is: "What is Serf?" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/index.html "Use Cases" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/use-cas…

The one thing that feels lacking to me, and maybe there's just something I don't get, is the ability to tag nodes with metadata. From the docs it seems like what you're expected to do is fire an event for a node to, eg., declare itself a webserver, but this seems prone to failure in the long run. If I bring a new load balancer online how does it find out what's a webserver already?

This might be a little unclear, but if you check the documentation for agent configuration (http://www.serfdom.io/docs/agent/options.html), there is an option to provide a role. The role is the metadata support currently

Re: Serf: A decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration

#20

Post by ubercore »

mitchellh wrote: post #9

I'm jumping on a plane right now (a couple hours) but I'd be happy to answer any questions related to Serf once I land. Just leave them here and I'll give it my best shot! We've dreamt of something like Serf for quite awhile and I'm glad it is now a reality. Some recommended URLs if you're curious what the point is: "What is Serf?" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/index.html "Use Cases" http://www.serfdom.io/intro/use-cas…

Since the main goal seems to be node discovery, can you compare why I might want to use this in addition to Salt? I've found salt's node discovery and targeting tools fast and powerful.
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