In a conversation with Chef and Puppet practitioners in the company I heard the same complaint over and over again. Configuration Management is sooo much better than manually configuring servers, but it is painful because all the configuration points that you still need to manage. Enter Service Discovery, a way to connect our different services together with no configuration. Service Discovery is great, but Consul is service discovery and much much more. It solves some of our orchestration issues and does configuration management as well. It is a key value store and a DNS server and its killer feature is Consul Events and Consul Templates.

I want to explain our Consul use cases, what it can do and where we are going with it. It is not one tool to rule them all, but it is a critical piece of our new infrastructure.

MP3