What is SmartStack?
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.
SmartStack is a tool in the Open Source Service Discovery category of a tech stack.
SmartStack is an open source tool with 245 GitHub stars and 51 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to SmartStack's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses SmartStack?
Companies
4 companies reportedly use SmartStack in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Brigade, and Fortytwo Data.
Developers
SmartStack Integrations
Pros of SmartStack
1
SmartStack's 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.
- 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.
SmartStack Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to SmartStack?
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.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
