import CallToAction from '@hashicorp/react-call-to-action' import CaseStudySlider from '@hashicorp/react-case-study-slider' import CodeBlock from '@hashicorp/react-code-block' import BeforeAfterDiagram from '../../components/before-after' export default function ServiceDiscovery() { return ( <>
Consul provides a registry of all the running nodes and services, along with their current health status. This allows operators to understand the environment, and applications and automation tools to interact with dynamic infrastructure using an HTTP API.
Consul enables service discovery using a built-in DNS server. This allows existing applications to easily integrate, as almost all applications support using DNS to resolve IP addresses. Using DNS instead of a static IP address allows services to scale up/down and route around failures easily.
Consul provides an HTTP API to query the service registry for nodes, services, and health check information. The API also supports blocking queries, or long-polling for any changes. This allows automation tools to react to services being registered or health status changes to change configurations or traffic routing in real time.
Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box with no complicated configuration. Look up services in other datacenters or keep the request local. Advanced features like Prepared Queries enable automatic failover to other datacenters.
Pairing service discovery with health checking prevents routing requests to unhealthy hosts and enables services to easily provide circuit breakers.