46 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
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---
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layout: "intro"
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page_title: "Introduction"
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sidebar_current: "what"
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---
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# Introduction to Serf
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Welcome to the intro guide to Serf! This guide will show you what Serf is,
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explain the problems Serf solves, compare Serf versus other similar
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software, and show how easy it is to actually use Serf. If you're already familiar
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with the basics of Serf, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more
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of a reference for all available features.
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## What is Serf?
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Serf is a service discovery and orchestration tool that is decentralized,
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highly available, and fault tolerant.
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Serf runs on every major platform: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is
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extremely lightweight: it uses 5 to 10 MB of resident memory and primarily
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communicates using infrequent UDP messages.
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Serf uses an efficient [gossip protocol](/docs/internals/gossip.html)
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to solve three major problems:
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* **Membership**: Serf maintains cluster membership lists and is able to
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execute custom handler scripts when that membership changes. For example,
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Serf can maintain the list of web servers for a load balancer and notify
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that load balancer whenever a node comes online or goes offline.
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* **Failure detection and recovery**: Serf automatically detects failed nodes within
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seconds, notifies the rest of the cluster,
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and executes handler scripts allowing you to handle these events.
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Serf will attempt to recover failed nodes by reconnecting to them
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periodically.
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* **Custom event propagation**: Serf can broadcast custom events to the cluster.
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These can be used to trigger deploys, propagate configuration, etc.
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See the [use cases page](/intro/use-cases.html) for a list of concrete use
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cases built on top of the features Serf provides. See the page on
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[how Serf compares to other software](/intro/vs-other-sw.html) to see just
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how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Or continue onwards with
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the [getting started guide](/intro/getting-started/install.html) to get
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Serf up and running and see how it works.
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