On: Ask HN: Are there any open source forks of nomad a...

[jsiepkes]

> Serf is a decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration that is lightweight, highly available, and fault tolerant.

I'm confused. Isn't that what consul originally was?

[chucky_z → jsiepkes]

Serf is used within Consul for agent to agent checks (and some communication). There's an entire subsystem called the 'serf check' that shows up within every single Consul agent. It's one component of the entire 'Consul' system.

[oarmstrong → jsiepkes]

Consul is built upon the Serf library. https://www.serf.io/intro/vs-consul.html

[stryan → jsiepkes]

IIRC Serf is mostly a library; I think the product around it is more for demonstration than actual expected use. Consul uses libserf for it's gossip protocol.