Introducing Consul…
As the distributed systems we build continue to grow, both in number and types of services, we need better tools to discover these services, check if the services are healthy, and to provide a common and consistent configuration store. This is where “Consul” comes in: Consul is completely distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes and services across multiple datacenters.
It allows clients to always have consistent and up-to-date information of their datacenter infrastructure, which includes a datacenter-wide services and nodes discovery, health checks, and key/value storage. Internally, it uses a consensus-based election and the gossip protocol to communicate between the nodes.
Consul decouples the discovery, configuration mgmt. and health checks out of the application and facilitates them via configuration, or with very minimum code changes. Developers do not have to use the brick-and-mortar approach to build a custom solution of their own to achieve the same functionality.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through installation and a few processes, including health checks, configuration management, and service discovery. Read More…
