mirror of https://github.com/hashicorp/consul
61 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: docs
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page_title: Gossip Protocol
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description: >-
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Consul uses a gossip protocol to manage membership and broadcast messages to
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the cluster. All of this is provided through the use of the Serf library. The
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gossip protocol used by Serf is based on SWIM: Scalable Weakly-consistent
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Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol, with a few minor
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adaptations.
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---
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# Gossip Protocol
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Consul uses a [gossip protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol)
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to manage membership and broadcast messages to the cluster. All of this is provided
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through the use of the [Serf library](https://www.serf.io/). The gossip protocol
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used by Serf is based on
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["SWIM: Scalable Weakly-consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol"](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/projects/spinglass/public_pdfs/swim.pdf),
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with a few minor adaptations. There are more details about [Serf's protocol here](https://www.serf.io/docs/internals/gossip.html).
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## Gossip in Consul
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Consul makes use of two different gossip pools. We refer to each pool as the
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LAN or WAN pool respectively. Each datacenter Consul operates in has a LAN gossip pool
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containing all members of the datacenter, both clients and servers. The LAN pool is
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used for a few purposes. Membership information allows clients to automatically discover
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servers, reducing the amount of configuration needed. The distributed failure detection
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allows the work of failure detection to be shared by the entire cluster instead of
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concentrated on a few servers. Lastly, the gossip pool allows for reliable and fast
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event broadcasts.
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The WAN pool is globally unique, as all servers should participate in the WAN pool
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regardless of datacenter. Membership information provided by the WAN pool allows
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servers to perform cross datacenter requests. The integrated failure detection
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allows Consul to gracefully handle an entire datacenter losing connectivity, or just
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a single server in a remote datacenter.
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All of these features are provided by leveraging [Serf](https://www.serf.io/). It
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is used as an embedded library to provide these features. From a user perspective,
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this is not important, since the abstraction should be masked by Consul. It can be useful
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however as a developer to understand how this library is leveraged.
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## Lifeguard Enhancements ((#lifeguard))
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SWIM makes the assumption that the local node is healthy in the sense
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that soft real-time processing of packets is possible. However, in cases
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where the local node is experiencing CPU or network exhaustion this assumption
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can be violated. The result is that the `serfHealth` check status can
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occasionally flap, resulting in false monitoring alarms, adding noise to
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telemetry, and simply causing the overall cluster to waste CPU and network
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resources diagnosing a failure that may not truly exist.
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Lifeguard completely resolves this issue with novel enhancements to SWIM.
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For more details about Lifeguard, please see the
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[Making Gossip More Robust with Lifeguard](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/making-gossip-more-robust-with-lifeguard/)
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blog post, which provides a high level overview of the HashiCorp Research paper
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[Lifeguard : SWIM-ing with Situational Awareness](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00788). The
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[Serf gossip protocol guide](https://www.serf.io/docs/internals/gossip.html#lifeguard)
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also provides some lower-level details about the gossip protocol and Lifeguard.
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