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website: Fill in the intro page

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Armon Dadgar 2014-04-10 13:31:47 -07:00
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@ -4,42 +4,41 @@ page_title: "Introduction"
sidebar_current: "what" sidebar_current: "what"
--- ---
# Introduction to Serf # Introduction to Consul
Welcome to the intro guide to Serf! This guide will show you what Serf is, Welcome to the intro guide to Consul! This guide is a the best place to start
explain the problems Serf solves, compare Serf versus other similar with Consul. We cover what Consul is, what problems it can solve, how it compares
software, and show how easy it is to actually use Serf. If you're already familiar to existing software, and a quick start for using Consul. If you are already familiar
with the basics of Serf, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more with the basics of Consul, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more
of a reference for all available features. of a reference for all available features.
## What is Serf? ## What is Consul?
Serf is a service discovery and orchestration tool that is decentralized, Consul has multiple components, but as a whole, it is tool for managing
highly available, and fault tolerant. and coordinating infrastructure. It provides several key features:
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.
Serf uses an efficient [gossip protocol](/docs/internals/gossip.html) * **Service Discovery**: Clients of Consul can _provide_ a service, such as
to solve three major problems: `api` or `mysql`, and other clients can use Consul to _discover_ providers
of a given service. Using either DNS or HTTP, applications can easily find
the services they depend upon.
* **Membership**: Serf maintains cluster membership lists and is able to * **Health Checking**: Consul clients can provide any number of health checks,
execute custom handler scripts when that membership changes. For example, either associated with a given service ("is the webserver returning 200 OK"), or
Serf can maintain the list of web servers for a load balancer and notify with the local node ("is memory utilization below 90%"). This information can be
that load balancer whenever a node comes online or goes offline. used by an operator to monitor cluster health, and it is used by the service
discovery components to route traffic away from unhealthy hosts.
* **Failure detection and recovery**: Serf automatically detects failed nodes within * **Key/Value Store**: Applications can make use of Consul's hierarchical key/value
seconds, notifies the rest of the cluster, store for any number of purposes including dynamic configuration, feature flagging,
and executes handler scripts allowing you to handle these events. coordination, leader election, etc. The simple HTTP API makes dead easy to use.
Serf will attempt to recover failed nodes by reconnecting to them
periodically.
* **Custom event propagation**: Serf can broadcast custom events to the cluster. * **Multi Datacenter**: Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. This
These can be used to trigger deploys, propagate configuration, etc. means users of Consul do not have to worry about building additional layers of
abstraction to grow to multiple regions.
See the [use cases page](/intro/use-cases.html) for a list of concrete use See the [use cases page](/intro/use-cases.html) for a list of concrete use
cases built on top of the features Serf provides. See the page on cases built on top of the features Consul provides. See the page on
[how Serf compares to other software](/intro/vs-other-sw.html) to see just [how Consul compares to other software](/intro/vs/index.html) to see just
how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Or continue onwards with how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Or continue onwards with
the [getting started guide](/intro/getting-started/install.html) to get the [getting started guide](/intro/getting-started/install.html) to get
Serf up and running and see how it works. Consul up and running and see how it works.