43 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
43 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: "intro"
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page_title: "Introduction"
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sidebar_current: "what"
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---
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# Introduction to Consul
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Welcome to the intro guide to Consul! This guide is a the best place to start
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with Consul. We cover what Consul is, what problems it can solve, how it compares
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to existing software, and a quick start for using Consul. If you are already familiar
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with the basics of Consul, the [documentation](/docs/index.html) provides more
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of a reference for all available features.
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## What is Consul?
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Consul has multiple components, but as a whole, it is tool for managing
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and coordinating infrastructure. It provides several key features:
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* **Service Discovery**: Clients of Consul can _provide_ a service, such as
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`api` or `mysql`, and other clients can use Consul to _discover_ providers
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of a given service. Using either DNS or HTTP, applications can easily find
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the services they depend upon.
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* **Health Checking**: Consul clients can provide any number of health checks,
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either associated with a given service ("is the webserver returning 200 OK"), or
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with the local node ("is memory utilization below 90%"). This information can be
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used by an operator to monitor cluster health, and it is used by the service
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discovery components to route traffic away from unhealthy hosts.
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* **Key/Value Store**: Applications can make use of Consul's hierarchical key/value
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store for any number of purposes including dynamic configuration, feature flagging,
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coordination, leader election, etc. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use.
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* **Multi Datacenter**: Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. This
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means users of Consul do not have to worry about building additional layers of
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abstraction to grow to multiple regions.
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See the page on [how Consul compares to other software](/intro/vs/index.html)
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to see just how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Or continue onwards with
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the [getting started guide](/intro/getting-started/install.html) to get
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Consul up and running and see how it works.
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