serf ☆

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Description:
Service orchestration and management tool

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | @hashicorp | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Devops

Tags: distributed-systems orchestration clustering gossip-protocol devops

Install: brew install serf

About:
Serf is a decentralized solution for cluster membership, failure detection, and orchestration. It uses a gossip protocol to efficiently manage node membership and propagate failure information. The tool is designed to be embedded into other applications to provide robust distributed coordination capabilities.

Key Features:

Decentralized and failure-tolerant
Customizable membership and failure detection
Lightweight gossip protocol
Embeddable library

Use Cases:

Managing dynamic node membership in distributed systems
Implementing custom orchestration logic
Providing real-time failure detection for services

Alternatives:

Consul – Consul provides a full suite of infrastructure tooling including KV store and service discovery, whereas Serf focuses specifically on membership and failure detection.
etcd – etcd is a consistent key-value store, while Serf uses an eventually consistent gossip model for higher availability in partitioned networks.

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Sep 14, 2024 5:44pm		0	VERSION_BUMP	ba54829d