Consul Service Discovery with Docker :: Jeff Lindsay Consul is a powerful tool for building distributed systems. There are a handful of alternatives in this space, but Consul is the only one that really tries to provide a comprehensive solution for service discovery. As my last post points out, service discovery is a little more than what Consul can provide us, but it is probably the biggest piece of the puzzle. Understanding Consul and the "Config Store" The heart of Consul is a particular class of distributed datastore with properties that make it ideal for cluster configuration and coordination. The father of config stores is Google's Chubby, which was never made publicly available but is described in the influential Chubby paper. These specialized datastores are defined by their use of a consensus algorithm requiring a quorum for writes and generally exposing a simple key-value store. You can learn more about the challenges of designing stateful distributed systems with the online book, Distributed systems for fun and profit. Onward…
Load-balancing Docker containers with Nginx and Consul-Template - Belly Card Engineering We are investing a lot of research and development time into leveraging Docker in the next generation of our internal infrastructure. One of the next components we need to build out to full maturity is being able to dynamically route web traffic from our Nginx load balancers to internal Docker containers in a performant way. We are very passionate fans of the work of HashiCorp at Belly, and they recently published a new project named Consul Template. We were using an earlier HashiCorp tool named consul–haproxy to reconfigure our Nginx load–balancers based on Consul data. Consul Template is a slightly more generalized tool that was fairly smooth to adopt. Let me walk you through a proof of concept I whipped up last week. Architecture At a high level, here is the construction of the current PoC. The Nginx container listens on the public port 80, and runs Consul Template. Finally, an example backend container is included for the load–balancer to proxy to. Breakdown Getting Started Help Wanted
Jeff Lindsay Consul is a powerful tool for building distributed systems. There are a handful of alternatives in this space, but Consul is the only one that really tries to provide a comprehensive solution for service discovery. As my last post points out, service discovery is a little more than what Consul can provide us, but it is probably the biggest piece of the puzzle. Understanding Consul and the "Config Store" The heart of Consul is a particular class of distributed datastore with properties that make it ideal for cluster configuration and coordination. The father of config stores is Google's Chubby, which was never made publicly available but is described in the influential Chubby paper. These specialized datastores are defined by their use of a consensus algorithm requiring a quorum for writes and generally exposing a simple key-value store. You can learn more about the challenges of designing stateful distributed systems with the online book, Distributed systems for fun and profit. Onward…