This week, Netflix has open sourced its Eureka service, which handles many infrastructure tasks for Netflix’s Amazon Web Services cloud implementation, including mid-tier load balancing, deployment automation, data storage, and caching. “Eureka is a REST-based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers,” reports Netflix. It should be of interest to many people deploying applications and services in the cloud.
You can get Eureka now on GitHub. As GigaOM notes:
“This is not the first time Netflix has stepped in to fill a void in Amazon’s platform and open-sourced the result. In June, the company put the source code to the Asgard technology it uses to deploy code changes fast (and to retract those changes just as fast if needed) to Github. Netflix said it is also working to integrate Asgard with Eureka.”
The Netflix blog also says:
“In AWS cloud, because of its inherent nature, servers come and go. Unlike the traditional load balancers which work with servers with well known IP addresses and host names, in AWS load balancing requires much more sophistication in registering and de-registering servers with the load balancer on the fly. Since AWS does not yet provide a middle tier load balancer, Eureka fills a big gap in that area.”
Amazon Web Services remains the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud, but it isn’t perfect. And, Netflix is noted for the efficiency of its site and services. Amazon already has its AWS Elastic Load Balancer, but it doesn’t specialize in mid-tier load balancing. You can find out much more about Eureka and what it does here.
