Topic

Serf

1 post about Serf. Every summary links to the original.

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Posts

Fly.io
Building clusters with serf, my new favorite thing
The post builds a geographically distributed Headless Chromium cluster on Fly.io and uses it to examine the limits of DNS-based service discovery. It first deploys Chromium in a Singapore Firecracker VM, secures Chrome Debug Protocol access by enabling Fly's private 6PN network and connecting through WireGuard, then scales instances across Singapore, Sydney, Paris, and Chile. Because DNS provides only snapshots and no convenient change notifications, each node runs a leaderless Serf agent bound to its private IPv6 address, tags members by role and region, and joins peers discovered through internal DNS. Serf then supplies an up-to-date membership map, RTT and Vivaldi-based nearness information, plus events and queries; the post concludes that it is simpler than Consul or Zookeeper and more capable than DNS for this setup.

The best engineering reads, once a week.

Topic

1 post about Serf. Every summary links to the original.

Paid picks we use ourselves. Links carry a referral code — a subscription through one earns us a commission at no extra cost to you.

Newest first

Fly.io
Building clusters with serf, my new favorite thing
The post builds a geographically distributed Headless Chromium cluster on Fly.io and uses it to examine the limits of DNS-based service discovery. It first deploys Chromium in a Singapore Firecracker VM, secures Chrome Debug Protocol access by enabling Fly's private 6PN network and connecting through WireGuard, then scales instances across Singapore, Sydney, Paris, and Chile. Because DNS provides only snapshots and no convenient change notifications, each node runs a leaderless Serf agent bound to its private IPv6 address, tags members by role and region, and joins peers discovered through internal DNS. Serf then supplies an up-to-date membership map, RTT and Vivaldi-based nearness information, plus events and queries; the post concludes that it is simpler than Consul or Zookeeper and more capable than DNS for this setup.

The best engineering reads, once a week.