Consul Service Discovery with Docker

Consul Service Discovery with Docker(progrium.com)

60 points by progrium 11 years ago | 3 comments

krallin 11 years ago |

One small thing that makes Consul exciting (especially when compared to etcd) is its -bootstrap-expect flag [0].

It's the recommended way to stand up a Consul cluster without a risk of causing split brain if it turns out multiple nodes are coming up at the exact same time, and it achieves that without an external / pre-existing coordination service.

In comparison, etcd's recommended way to bootstrap a cluster is to use CoreOS' "discovery" service, which is great, but does constitute one extra dependency.

Now, the downside of Consul is that it seems etcd has much more momentum.

  [0]: http://www.consul.io/docs/guides/bootstrapping.html

progrium 11 years ago | |

Yeah, and actually, that bootstrapping was previously a manual process, but thanks to DigitalOcean I had my summer intern Robert (@robxu9) implement and submit the patch for -bootstrap-expect.

meatmanek 11 years ago |

Consul is pretty neat, and in my experiments with it, it's really easy to spin up and modify a cluster. It seems like they really thought through the procedures.

Another mature option for service discovery that this port doesn't mention is AirBnB's SmartStack: https://github.com/airbnb/synapse and https://github.com/airbnb/nerve. Here's a talk from DockerCon about using SmartStack and Docker: http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/dockercon-video-building-a-sm...