Spectral

spectral is an experimental decentralized service-discovery system for high-churn environments.

Each sidecar participates in a sparse expander overlay, advertises local services, and discovers live providers without relying on a central registry. The design combines DEX-inspired graph maintenance with randomized discovery and epoch-based topology resizing.

How It Works

• Constant-degree expander overlay for scalable connectivity
• Randomized walks for membership sampling
• Parallel multi-path service lookups
• Stable node identities across topology epochs
• Join, graceful-leave, and crash handling
• Inflation and deflation as population changes

Quick Start

Requirements

General development

• Go 1.27+
• Docker

Network simulation

• kind
• kubectl

Setup

Install the listed requirements, and set up the cluster with

make bootstrap

When you are done developing and need to delete the cluster, make sure to shut it down:

make kind-down

Development

When you make changes to the spectral daemon while testing, update your local kubernetes cluster with

make spctrld-dev

Which will build the daemon's docker image, push it to kind, and tell the cluster to restart spctrld deployments with the updated version.