Show HN: Baker Street – A simple client-side load balancer for microservices

We made this because we discovered that <i>lots</i> of companies using microservices have independently converged on this type of architecture for load balancing (client-side HAProxy + integrated service discovery component + health checks), but there wasn&#x27;t a simple, easy-to-setup, end-to-end solution out there. (Our favorite for the record is AirBnb&#x27;s SmartStack.) We&#x27;d love for some feedback and&#x2F;or PRs and&#x2F;or GitHub stars!

This looks really handy - thanks! A word of warning though: TfL <i>aggressively</i> protects the roundel trademark.

This looks great! Looking forward to playing around with it.<p>I loved the idea of Airbnb&#x27;s Synapse, but it&#x27;s tricky to configure (you basically have to write an haproxy config from scratch plus learn how synapse config sections map to the haproxy config). Plus it seemed like the non-zookeeper backends were pretty unstable, I had to fix a few things to get it working with ec2 tags (and fwiw, at this point it&#x27;s been over a month and my PR to merge the changes back upstream hasn&#x27;t even been commented on).<p>How does Baker Street handle restarting haproxy, does it do anything like this[0] automatically to get zero-downtime configuration reloads?<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineeringblog.yelp.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;true-zero-downtime-haproxy-reloads.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineeringblog.yelp.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;true-zero-downtime-h...</a>

If I&#x27;m reading it right, the directory service today is a single host. That was very misleading after these statements (which suggested something closer to netflix eureka):<p>&quot;Zookeeper provides a strongly consistent model; the directory service focuses on availability.&quot;<p>&quot;Baker Street doesn&#x27;t use Zookeeper or the other popular service discovery frameworks because we wanted a simple, highly available service, not a strongly consistent one.&quot;<p>Edit: Which is not to say that the project isn&#x27;t interesting, just that some of the copy felt like a bait and switch. :)

Thanks for sharing. Sent this to my team as we were talking about this problem just this afternoon.<p>Points for sudo nano in the install guide.

&quot;Datawire Directory&quot; =&gt; Mycroft

Curious: why choose something like Watson over using haproxy&#x27;s pretty solid built in health checking mechanisms?

so if a HTTP request comes in, how does it communicate with existing HTTP microservices and know that it&#x27;s available or not? Does it do this by polling?<p>I might actually give this a go since I need to route HTTP request to hundreds of flask servers but if they are busy, I don&#x27;t want to keep hitting it.