go.serversets

Package go.serversets provides an simple interface for service discovery using Apache Zookeeper. Servers/endpoints register themselves and clients always have an updated host list.

This core package just provides a list of hostnames and ports. Sub-packages wrap the endpoint list for common use cases:

• mcset provides consistent hashing over a set of memcache hosts.
• httpset round-robins standard HTTP requests to the set of hosts.
• fixedset severset watch without the zookeeper. Take advantage of
• thriftset does "least request" load balancing around the given endpoints.

This package is used internally at Strava for Finagle service discovery and memcache node registration.

Usage

First, create a ServerSet defining an environment and service name.

zookeepers := []string{"zk01.internal", "zk02.internal", "zk03.internal"}
serverSet := serversets.New(serversets.Staging, "service_name", zookeepers)

This doesn't actually connect to the Zookeeper servers, just defines the namespace. Methods like RegisterEndpoint and Watch will return an error if they can't connect. Available environment constants: serversets.Local, serversets.Staging, serversets.Production and serversets.Test.

Register an Endpoint

Service endpoints/producers/servers should register themselves as an endpoint. Example:

pingFunction := func() error {
	return nil
}

endpoint, err := serverSet.RegisterEndpoint(
	localIP,
	servicePort,
	pingFunction)

The ping function can be nil. But if it's not, it'll be checked every second, by default. If there is an error the endpoint will be unregistered. Once the issue is resolved it'll be reregistered automatically. This allows for registering external processes that may fail independently of the monitoring process.

Watch the list of available endpoints, for consumers

watch, err = serverSet.Watch()
if err != nil {
	// probably something wrong with connecting to Zookeeper
	panic(err)
}

endpoints := watch.Endpoints()
for {
	<-watch.Event()
	// endpoint list changed
}

The watch.Event() channel will be triggered whenever the endpoint list changes and watch.Endpoints() will contain the updated list of available endpoints.

Finagle Compatibility

The Zookeeper zNode data is designed to be compatible with Finagle ServerSets. It is just a matter or matching the namespaces in the ServerSet declarations. This library registers endpoints to zNodes similar to /discovery/staging/service_name/member_0000000318.

A Scala snippet to register an endpoint discoverable by the watch created above:

val serverHost: java.net.InetSocketAddress
val zookeeperHost: java.net.InetSocketAddress

val zookeeperClient = new ZookeeperClient(sessionTimeout, zookeeperHost)
val serverSet = new ServerSetImpl(zk.zookeeperClient, "/discovery/staging/service_name")
val cluster = new ZookeeperServerSetCluster(serverSet)

cluster.join(serverHost)

The namespaces used by this library are completely configurable. One just needs to defining their own BaseZnodePath function.

Dependencies

Dependencies are vendored in the /vendor directory. This is compatible with the 'Go 1.5 vendor experiment.' Set GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1 during the build to make use of these packages.

Tests

Tests require a Zookeeper server. The default is "localhost" but a different host can be used by changing the TestServer variable in serverset_test.go

go test github.com/strava/go.serversets/...

Potential Improvements and Contributing

This library simply provides a list of active endpoints. But it would nice if it did some load balancing, error checking, retries etc. Simple versions of this are available for memcache and http but they can be improved. So, if you have some ideas, submit a pull request.