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Baker Street vs Serf: What are the differences?
What is Baker Street? A simple client-side load balancer for microservices. Baker Street is an HAProxy-based client side load balancer that simplifies scaling, testing, and upgrading microservices.
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.
Baker Street and Serf belong to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Baker Street are:
- automatically splitting traffic among all healthy services sharing the same name in the system
- making load balancing more efficient and robust by using local load balancers
- removing problematic instances from the rotation more quickly by using local health checkers
On the other hand, Serf provides the following key features:
- 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.
Baker Street and Serf are both open source tools. Serf with 4.7K GitHub stars and 467 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Baker Street with 222 GitHub stars and 16 GitHub forks.
