Baker Street vs SmartStack: What are the differences?

Developers describe Baker Street as "A simple client-side load balancer for microservices". Baker Street is an HAProxy-based client side load balancer that simplifies scaling, testing, and upgrading microservices. On the other hand, SmartStack is detailed as "Automated service discovery and registration framework". Scaling a web infrastructure requires services, and building a service-oriented infrastructure is hard. Make it EASY, with SmartStack’s automated, transparent service discovery and registration: cruise control for your distributed infrastructure.

Baker Street and SmartStack belong to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Baker Street are:

• 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

On the other hand, SmartStack provides the following key features:

• Within a health check interval’s delay of a backend becoming healthy, it is made available in Zookeeper
• this makes it instantly available to consumers via Synapse’s Zookeeper watches.
• We detect problems within a health check interval, and take backends out of rotation. A mechanism which allows services to notify Nerve that they’re not healthy is planned, to reduce the interval further. In the meantime, deploys can stop Nerve when they start, and then re-start it at the end.

Baker Street and SmartStack are both open source tools. It seems that SmartStack with 228 GitHub stars and 41 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Baker Street with 222 GitHub stars and 16 GitHub forks.