---
layout: docs
page_title: Gossip Protocol
description: |-
  Learn how Nomad's gossip protocol uses the Serf library to provide server membership management, which includes cross-region requests, failure detection, and automatic clustering using a consensus protocol.
---

# Gossip Protocol

This page provides conceptual information about Nomad's gossip protocol, which
provides server membership management, cross-region requests, failure detection,
and automatic clustering using a consensus protocol.

Nomad uses the [Serf library][serf] to provide a [gossip
protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol) to manage membership.
The gossip protocol used by Serf is based on ["SWIM: Scalable Weakly-consistent
Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol"][swim], with a few minor
adaptations. There are more details about [Serf's protocol here][gossip].

~> **Advanced Topic!** This page covers technical details of
the internals of Nomad. You do not need to know these details to effectively
operate and use Nomad. These details are documented here for those who wish
to learn about them without having to go spelunking through the source code.

## Gossip in Nomad

Nomad makes use of a single global WAN gossip pool that all servers participate
in. Membership information provided by the gossip pool allows servers to perform
cross region requests. The integrated failure detection allows Nomad to
gracefully handle an entire region losing connectivity, or just a single server
in a remote region. Nomad also uses the gossip protocol to detect servers in the
same region to perform automatic clustering via the [consensus
protocol](/nomad/docs/concepts/consensus).

To provide all these features, Nomad uses [Serf][serf] as an embedded
library. From a user perspective, this is not important, since Nomad masks the
abstraction. However, developers may find it useful to understand how Nomad
leverages the Serf library.


[serf]: https://github.com/hashicorp/serf
[gossip]: https://github.com/hashicorp/serf/blob/master/docs/internals/gossip.html.markdown
[swim]: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/Quicksilver/public_pdfs/SWIM.pdf
