[devonbleak]

With a service-oriented architecture (SOA) you basically break your application into distinct services that run across different machines. But you also need a way to find and connect to those services (service discovery). This provides a way of doing that using ZooKeeper and local HAProxy processes.

[superbaconman]

So I register a new service (or process) to run on metal using Chef. Then Chef installs the service and updates the nerve config running on that metal device. Nerve then keeps a central Zookeeper updated with the status of its local services? Synapse checks for available services in zookeeper that your app may need to use, and then configures a local load balancer for any requests you make?

[igor47]

That's the idea! If you're using Chef, check out the cookbook for SmartStack; you keep a small hash of configuration information per service, and we take care of the rest. https://github.com/airbnb/smartstack-cookbook

[frontendbeauty]

Yep.