Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. Register external services such as SaaS providers as well.
Pairing service discovery with health checking prevents routing requests to unhealthy hosts and enables services to easily provide circuit breakers.
Consul scales to multiple datacenters out of the box with no complicated configuration. Look up services in other datacenters, or keep the request local.
Flexible key/value store for dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. Long poll for near-instant notification of configuration changes.
Look up services using Consul's built-in DNS server. Support existing infrastructure without any code change.
admin@hashicorp: dig web-frontend.service.consul. ANY
; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> web-frontend.service.consul. ANY
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 29981
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;web-frontend.service.consul. IN ANY
;; ANSWER SECTION:
web-frontend.service.consul. 0 IN A 10.0.3.83
web-frontend.service.consul. 0 IN A 10.0.1.109
admin@hashicorp:
Consul provides a hierarchical key/value store with a simple HTTP API. Managing configuration has never been simpler.
admin@hashicorp: curl -X PUT -d 'bar' http://localhost:8500/v1/kv/foo
true
admin@hashicorp: curl http://localhost:8500/v1/kv/foo
[
{
"CreateIndex": 100,
"ModifyIndex": 200,
"Key": "foo",
"Flags": 0,
"Value": "YmFy"
}
]
admin@hashicorp:
The intro and getting started guide contain a simple and approachable walkthrough for running Consul locally.