Baker Street¶
Baker Street (hereafter shortened as Baker) is a service discovery and routing system designed for microservice architectures. Baker simplifies scaling, testing, and upgrading microservices.
Why use Baker?¶
Suppose you have two microservices, A and B, that communicate with each other. For scalability and availability, both microservices are deployed on multiple servers (or containers).
Baker solves several problems:
- Service discovery. Requests from A to B automatically locate an available instance of the B microservice.
- Load balancing. Requests from A to B are automatically distributed between all available instances of B, without requiring a central load balancer in front of B.
- Upgrades and testing. New versions of a microservice can be easily introduced by adding a new server instance to the service pool. Load will be distributed to the new version, and old instances can be turned off as new ones are introduced to the pool.
Deploying Baker¶
Baker runs on any modern flavor of Linux. Baker works with any application or microservice, regardless of programming language. Usually, you just need a small configuration change in your microservice to start using Baker.
How Baker Works¶
Baker consists of three main components:
- Sherlock, which is responsible for routing a microservice’s connections to the right destination
- Watson, which provides real-time liveness detection of a given microservice
- the Datawire Directory, which keeps track of all microservices and their associated routes
Sherlock and Watson are deployed on every microservice container or server. Each microservice is then configured to proxy its connections through Sherlock (behind the scenes, we use the super-reliable, super-fast HAProxy). Sherlock uses information from the Directory to route connections to the appropriate destination.