SmartStack vs Serf

Overview

SmartStack

Stacks7

Followers51

Votes1

GitHub Stars245

Forks44

Serf

Stacks14

Followers26

Votes0

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks604

Serf vs SmartStack: What are the differences?

What is Serf? Service orchestration and management tool. Serf is a service discovery and orchestration tool that is decentralized, highly available, and fault tolerant. Serf runs on every major platform: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is extremely lightweight: it uses 5 to 10 MB of resident memory and primarily communicates using infrequent UDP messages.

What is SmartStack? Automated service discovery and registration framework. Scaling a web infrastructure requires services, and building a service-oriented infrastructure is hard. Make it EASY, with SmartStack’s automated, transparent service discovery and registration: cruise control for your distributed infrastructure.

Serf and SmartStack belong to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Serf are:

Membership: Serf maintains cluster membership lists and is able to execute custom handler scripts when that membership changes. For example, Serf can maintain the list of web servers for a load balancer and notify that load balancer whenever a node comes online or goes offline.
Failure detection and recovery: Serf automatically detects failed nodes within seconds, notifies the rest of the cluster, and executes handler scripts allowing you to handle these events. Serf will attempt to recover failed nodes by reconnecting to them periodically.
Custom event propagation: Serf can broadcast custom events and queries to the cluster. These can be used to trigger deploys, propagate configuration, etc. Events are simply fire-and-forget broadcast, and Serf makes a best effort to deliver messages in the face of offline nodes or network partitions. Queries provide a simple realtime request/response mechanism.

On the other hand, SmartStack provides the following key features:

Within a health check interval’s delay of a backend becoming healthy, it is made available in Zookeeper
this makes it instantly available to consumers via Synapse’s Zookeeper watches.
We detect problems within a health check interval, and take backends out of rotation. A mechanism which allows services to notify Nerve that they’re not healthy is planned, to reduce the interval further. In the meantime, deploys can stop Nerve when they start, and then re-start it at the end.

Serf and SmartStack are both open source tools. It seems that Serf with 4.7K GitHub stars and 467 forks on GitHub has more adoption than SmartStack with 228 GitHub stars and 41 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

SmartStack	Serf
Scaling a web infrastructure requires services, and building a service-oriented infrastructure is hard. Make it EASY, with SmartStack’s automated, transparent service discovery and registration: cruise control for your distributed infrastructure.	Serf is a service discovery and orchestration tool that is decentralized, highly available, and fault tolerant. Serf runs on every major platform: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is extremely lightweight: it uses 5 to 10 MB of resident memory and primarily communicates using infrequent UDP messages.
Within a health check interval’s delay of a backend becoming healthy, it is made available in Zookeeper;this makes it instantly available to consumers via Synapse’s Zookeeper watches.;We detect problems within a health check interval, and take backends out of rotation. A mechanism which allows services to notify Nerve that they’re not healthy is planned, to reduce the interval further. In the meantime, deploys can stop Nerve when they start, and then re-start it at the end.;Synapse acts on information the moment it’s published in Zookeeper, and reconfiguring HAProxy is very very fast most of the time. Because we utilize HAProxy’s stats socket for many changes, we don’t even restart the process unless we have to add new backends.;Because our infrastructure is distributed, we cannot do centralized planning. But HAProxy provides very configurable queueing semantics. For our biggest clients, we set up intelligent queueing at the HAProxy layer;for others, we at least guarantee round-robin.;Doing debugging or maintenance on a backend is as simple as stopping the Nerve process on the machine;nothing else is affected!;You can see exactly which backends are available simply by looking at the HAProxy status page. Because of HAProxy’s excellent log output, you also get amazing aggregate and per-request information, including statistics on number of behavior of requests right in rsyslog.;The infrastructure is completely distributed. The most critical nodes are the Zookeeper nodes, and Zookeeper is specifically designed to be distributed and robust against failure.	Membership: Serf maintains cluster membership lists and is able to execute custom handler scripts when that membership changes. For example, Serf can maintain the list of web servers for a load balancer and notify that load balancer whenever a node comes online or goes offline.;Failure detection and recovery: Serf automatically detects failed nodes within seconds, notifies the rest of the cluster, and executes handler scripts allowing you to handle these events. Serf will attempt to recover failed nodes by reconnecting to them periodically.;Custom event propagation: Serf can broadcast custom events and queries to the cluster. These can be used to trigger deploys, propagate configuration, etc. Events are simply fire-and-forget broadcast, and Serf makes a best effort to deliver messages in the face of offline nodes or network partitions. Queries provide a simple realtime request/response mechanism.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 245	GitHub Stars 6.0K
GitHub Forks 44	GitHub Forks 604
Stacks 7	Stacks 14
Followers 51	Followers 26
Votes 1	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 1 Elegant and powerful	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Chef	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to SmartStack, Serf?

Consul

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

Eureka

Eureka is a REST (Representational State Transfer) based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers.

Zookeeper

A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.

etcd

etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.

Keepalived

The main goal of this project is to provide simple and robust facilities for loadbalancing and high-availability to Linux system and Linux based infrastructures.

SkyDNS

SkyDNS is a distributed service for announcement and discovery of services. It leverages Raft for high-availability and consensus, and utilizes DNS queries to discover available services. This is done by leveraging SRV records in DNS, with special meaning given to subdomains, priorities and weights (more info here: http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns).

Nacos

It is an easy-to-use dynamic service discovery, configuration and service management platform for building cloud native applications.

Libraries.io

It is an open source web service that lists software development project dependencies and alerts developers to new versions of the software libraries they are using.

ODD Platform

It is a next-generation data discovery and observability tool for enterprises and startups that help to efficiently democratize data, powers collaboration of data science and data engineering teams, significantly reduces time to data discovery, cuts on data downtime and offers a modern, easy-to-use environment with quick time-to-value. It makes all your data entities reliable, observable, and easily discoverable.