diff --git a/website/source/intro/index.html.markdown b/website/source/intro/index.html.markdown index b2237b5d83..263f8407d5 100644 --- a/website/source/intro/index.html.markdown +++ b/website/source/intro/index.html.markdown @@ -4,42 +4,41 @@ page_title: "Introduction" sidebar_current: "what" --- -# Introduction to Serf +# Introduction to Consul -Welcome to the intro guide to Serf! This guide will show you what Serf is, -explain the problems Serf solves, compare Serf versus other similar -software, and show how easy it is to actually use Serf. If you're already familiar -with the basics of Serf, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more +Welcome to the intro guide to Consul! This guide is a the best place to start +with Consul. We cover what Consul is, what problems it can solve, how it compares +to existing software, and a quick start for using Consul. If you are already familiar +with the basics of Consul, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more of a reference for all available features. -## What is Serf? +## What is Consul? -Serf is a service discovery and orchestration tool that is decentralized, -highly available, and fault tolerant. -Serf runs on every major platform: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is -extremely lightweight: it uses 5 to 10 MB of resident memory and primarily -communicates using infrequent UDP messages. +Consul has multiple components, but as a whole, it is tool for managing +and coordinating infrastructure. It provides several key features: -Serf uses an efficient [gossip protocol](/docs/internals/gossip.html) -to solve three major problems: +* **Service Discovery**: Clients of Consul can _provide_ a service, such as + `api` or `mysql`, and other clients can use Consul to _discover_ providers + of a given service. Using either DNS or HTTP, applications can easily find + the services they depend upon. -* **Membership**: Serf maintains cluster membership lists and is able to - execute custom handler scripts when that membership changes. For example, - Serf can maintain the list of web servers for a load balancer and notify - that load balancer whenever a node comes online or goes offline. +* **Health Checking**: Consul clients can provide any number of health checks, + either associated with a given service ("is the webserver returning 200 OK"), or + with the local node ("is memory utilization below 90%"). This information can be + used by an operator to monitor cluster health, and it is used by the service + discovery components to route traffic away from unhealthy hosts. -* **Failure detection and recovery**: Serf automatically detects failed nodes within - seconds, notifies the rest of the cluster, - and executes handler scripts allowing you to handle these events. - Serf will attempt to recover failed nodes by reconnecting to them - periodically. +* **Key/Value Store**: Applications can make use of Consul's hierarchical key/value + store for any number of purposes including dynamic configuration, feature flagging, + coordination, leader election, etc. The simple HTTP API makes dead easy to use. -* **Custom event propagation**: Serf can broadcast custom events to the cluster. - These can be used to trigger deploys, propagate configuration, etc. +* **Multi Datacenter**: Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. This + means users of Consul do not have to worry about building additional layers of + abstraction to grow to multiple regions. See the [use cases page](/intro/use-cases.html) for a list of concrete use -cases built on top of the features Serf provides. See the page on -[how Serf compares to other software](/intro/vs-other-sw.html) to see just +cases built on top of the features Consul provides. See the page on +[how Consul compares to other software](/intro/vs/index.html) to see just how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Or continue onwards with the [getting started guide](/intro/getting-started/install.html) to get -Serf up and running and see how it works. +Consul up and running and see how it works.