wglass/lighthouse

.. title:: Lighthouse Service Discovery Tool

Lighthouse Service Discovery Tool
=================================

.. image:: /static/lighthouse.png
    :alt: Lighthouse
    :align: left

..

  Lighthouse is a service node discovery system written in python, built with
  resilience, flexibility and ease-of-use in mind and inspired by Airbnb's
  SmartStack_ solution.  Out of the box it supports discovery via Zookeeper_ with
  cluster load balancing handled by an automatically configured HAProxy_.

  To jump right in see the :doc:`getting_started` page, or if you'd like to see
  it in action check out the :doc:`examples` page.

Overview
~~~~~~~~

A lighthouse setup consists of three parts running locally on each node: a load
balancer, the `lighthouse-writer` script and (usually) the `lighthouse-reporter`
script.

.. image:: /static/soa_node.png
    :alt: Diagram of a node
    :align: right

In a Lighthouse setup, no node's application code is aware of the existence of
other nodes, they talk to a local port handled by an instance of the load
balancer which in turn routes traffic among the various known other nodes.

This local load balancer is automatically updated when nodes come and go
via the `lighthouse-writer` script, which talks to the discovery method (e.g.
Zookeeper) to keep track of which nodes on which clusters are up.

The `lighthouse-reporter` script likewise talks to the discovery method, it is
responsible for running health checks on any services on the local node and
reports to the discovery method that the healthy services are up and the
unhealthy ones are down.


Development
~~~~~~~~~~~

The code is hosted on GitHub_

To file a bug or possible enhancement see the `Issue Tracker`_, also found
on GitHub.


License
~~~~~~~

Lighthouse is licensed under the terms of the Apache license (2.0).  See the
LICENSE_ file for more details.

.. _SmartStack: http://nerds.airbnb.com/smartstack-service-discovery-cloud/
.. _Zookeeper: https://zookeeper.apache.org
.. _HAProxy: http://www.haproxy.org
.. _GitHub: https://github.com/wglass/lighthouse
.. _`Issue Tracker`: https://github.com/wglass/lighthouse/issues
.. _LICENSE: https://github.com/wglass/lighthouse/blob/master/LICENSE

.. toctree::
   :hidden:
   :titlesonly:
   :maxdepth: 2

   getting_started
   configuration
   examples
   writing_plugins
   source_docs
   releases