luxolus
/
open-consul
2
0
Fork 0
Code Issues 1 Pull Requests Packages Releases Wiki Activity

website: Fill in the intro page

This commit is contained in:
Armon Dadgar 2014-04-10 13:31:47 -07:00
parent d1d30b36ed
commit f602369941
1 changed files with 26 additions and 27 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

53
website/source/intro/index.html.markdown
View File

@ -4,42 +4,41 @@ page_title: "Introduction"
sidebar_current: "what"
---
# Introduction to Serf
# Introduction to Consul
Welcome to the intro guide to Serf! This guide will show you what Serf is,
explain the problems Serf solves, compare Serf versus other similar
software, and show how easy it is to actually use Serf. If you're already familiar
with the basics of Serf, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more
Welcome to the intro guide to Consul! This guide is a the best place to start
with Consul. We cover what Consul is, what problems it can solve, how it compares
to existing software, and a quick start for using Consul. If you are already familiar
with the basics of Consul, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more
of a reference for all available features.
## What is Serf?
## What is Consul?
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.
Consul has multiple components, but as a whole, it is tool for managing
and coordinating infrastructure. It provides several key features:
Serf uses an efficient [gossip protocol](/docs/internals/gossip.html)
to solve three major problems:
* **Service Discovery**: Clients of Consul can _provide_ a service, such as
`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
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.
* **Health Checking**: Consul clients can provide any number of health checks,
either associated with a given service ("is the webserver returning 200 OK"), or
with the local node ("is memory utilization below 90%"). This information can be
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
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.
* **Key/Value Store**: Applications can make use of Consul's hierarchical key/value
store for any number of purposes including dynamic configuration, feature flagging,
coordination, leader election, etc. The simple HTTP API makes dead easy to use.
* **Custom event propagation**: Serf can broadcast custom events to the cluster.
These can be used to trigger deploys, propagate configuration, etc.
* **Multi Datacenter**: Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. This
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
cases built on top of the features Serf provides. See the page on
[how Serf compares to other software](/intro/vs-other-sw.html) to see just
cases built on top of the features Consul provides. See the page on
[how Consul compares to other software](/intro/vs/index.html) to see just
how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Or continue onwards with
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.