Rackspace Launches Service Registry | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace Launches Service Registry

rackspace.com

38 pointstomazmuraus6 comments

I think this will be a great product for startups -- everyone wants to build products on top of a dynamic environment, but to really do it, you would need to invest in heavy use of things like using Zookeeper -- but Zookeeper has a very high cost to integrate and maintain.

Netflix has released something very similar, Eureka, as open source here:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/09/eureka.html

But the Rackspace Service Registry comes with a SaaS model, more client libraries, and is hopefully easier to integrate.

(disclaimer, I work at Rackspace, but not on this product)

This is interesting. How er the true cost of inter service discovery is in maintenance. Adding a new service is trivial. Deprecating a service, or an API major rev, is a PITA. Eventually you just end up with an unmaintainable morass of "deprecated" services and dead ends.

Speaking of, what's the work flow around service API revs? New config knob then query on the client side? Create a new service instance.

The service registry I wrote (http://github.com/substack/seaport) is fundamentally version-aware to avoid this problem. You register services with a semver such as `web@1.2.3` and then clients or other services query for registered services with semver query strings such as `web@1.2.x`. This way you can specify your breaking changes much more explicitly and not need to port over the clients to the new service all at once.

You can also use Doozer(d)[0] which is similar to Apache Zookeeper[1] and Google Chubby[2].

[0] https://github.com/ha/doozerd

[1] http://zookeeper.apache.org/

[2] http://research.google.com/archive/chubby.html

I was under the impression that Doozer was ditched by Heroku, keep in mind this was through the grapevine and therefore; it's speculation.

This[1] seems to be the fork most people are following these days.

[1]: https://github.com/4ad/doozerd

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