Project End-of-Life

The Merlin project has reached its end-of-life. No further pull requests can be opened or issues can be raised.

Thank-you for your interest in Merlin.

merlin

Merlin is a distributed IPVS manager. It can be used to create a clustered load balancer. It provides:

An API and command line tool to administer configuration.
Replication of IPVS configuration across multiple nodes.
Health checks of attached servers.

Requirements:

etcd cluster for state
IPVS kernel modules

Usage:

# run on every IPVS node
merlin -store-endpoints http://etcd0:2379,http://etcd1:2379,http://etcd3:2379

Administer:

# merlinhost is any IPVS node running merlin
meradm -H merlinhost list
meradm -H merlinhost service add mylb tcp 10.1.1.1:80 -s sh -b flag-1,flag-2
meradm -h # display other commands

Library:

import "context"
import "fmt"
import "google.golang.org/grpc"
import "github.com/sky-uk/merlin/types"

func main() {
	conn, _ := grpc.Dial("merlinhost:4282", grpc.WithInsecure())
	defer conn.Close()
	c := types.NewMerlinClient(conn)
	resp, _ := c.List(context.Background(), &empty.Empty{})
	for _, item := range resp.Items {
		fmt.Println(item)
	}
}

Design

The desired state is stored in an etcd cluster.

Every participating merlin node will watch etcd for changes, and then update their local ipvs to match the desired state.

merlin was originally inspired by gorb. The main differences are:

IPVS is reconciled against actual state, improving robustness.
cli tool that closely mimics ipvsadm, with gRPC for API usage.
More test coverage, including end to end tests to verify behavior.

Development

You need golang 1.9+.

make setup          # setup required tools and dependencies
make install check  # run tests and install
make                # same as `install check`
make format         # format all files
make proto          # regenerate protobuf/gRPC bindings. requires protoc installed.

Dependencies are managed with dep. vendor folder is never checked in.

gRPC definitions are managed in types and are generated with make proto. Ensure you run make setup so you have the latest golang generator.

Testing should be done with gingko/gomega. e2e tests cover the CRUD interaction, unit tests cover asynchronous interactions such as IPVS reconciliation.

Remaining features

bgp client for ECMP