Baker Street

Baker Street is a service discovery and routing system designed for microservice architectures.

Baker Street simplifies scaling, testing, and upgrading microservices by:

• automatically splitting traffic among all healthy services sharing the same name in the system
• making load balancing more efficient and robust by using local load balancers
• removing problematic instances from the rotation more quickly by using local health checkers
• enabling canary testing for staged testing and deployment of service upgrades

Baker Street consists of three components:

• Sherlock - an HAProxy-based routing system with local instances corresponding to each instance of your application to determine where connections from that instance should go
• Watson - a health checker with local instances corresponding to each instance of your application
• Datawire Directory - a global service discovery mechanism that receives availability information from each Watson instance and pushes changes in availability to local Sherlock instances as needed

Baker Street System Requirements

Baker Street works on any flavor of Enterprise Linux 7 or on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Since Baker Street must be co-located with your service, your service must also run on one of these platforms if you wish to use it with Baker Street. Baker Street has no other requirements; you are free to use the language, framework, and tools of your choice while integrating with it.

That said, if you wish to test your installation using a simple sample service as outlined in the Baker Street documentation, you will also need the following:

• JDK 1.8
• maven 3 or higher

Installing Baker Street

We expect it to take approximately 15 minutes to install a working local development environment with all three components.

Directions for installing Baker Street locally can be found here.

Next Steps

Additional information about Baker Street's design and architecture can be found here.

Baker Street components all support a variety of options available via configuration files. For example, each component supports a range of logging levels that can be independently toggled within these configuration files. Information on how to configure each component can be found here.

Additional Information

For additional information, visit the Baker Street website at http://www.bakerstreet.io.

Please post any questions about Baker Street on Stack Overflow using the tag bakerstreet.