How does a consul work?

How does a consul work?

Consul is a distributed, highly available system. ... Every node that provides services to Consul runs a Consul agent. Running an agent is not required for discovering other services or getting/setting key/value data. The agent is responsible for health checking the services on the node as well as the node itself.

How do I set up consul?

Install & Configure Consul Agent On Client Mode

1. Step 1: Update the package repositories and install unzip. ...
2. Step 2: Head over to consul downloads page. ...
3. Step 3: Download the consul binary to /opt directory. ...
4. Step 4: Unzip consul binary. ...
5. Step 5: Move consul executable to /usr/bin directory to be accessible system-wide.

What can you do with Consul?

Consul is a distributed, highly available, datacenter-aware, service discovery and configuration system. It can be used to present services and nodes in a flexible and powerful interface that allows clients to always have an up-to-date view of the infrastructure they are a part of.

Why is consul used?

Consul is a Hashicorp based tool for discovering and configuring a variety of different services in your infrastructure. It is based and built on Golang. ... Multi Datacenter Deployment − Consul supports multiple datacenters. It is used for building additional layers of abstraction to grow to multiple regions.

Does Consul do load balancing?

Consul is a free and open source tool that provides service discovery, health checking, load balancing, and a globally distributed key-value store. ... This is the job of the load balancing layer.

What port does Consul run on?

Consul requires up to 6 different ports to work properly, some on TCP, UDP, or both protocols....Ports Table.

Use	Default Ports
HTTP: The HTTP API (TCP Only)	8500
HTTPS: The HTTPs API	disabled (8501)*
gRPC: The gRPC API	disabled (8502)*
LAN Serf: The Serf LAN port (TCP and UDP)	8301

Which command is used for DNS queries Consul?

Query Consul DNS and BIND To ensure that Consul DNS and your DNS server are configured correctly, use a dig query for the service you've registered. $ dig @127.0.

How do I stop being a Consul agent?

Stop the agent Stop the Consul agent by using the consul leave command. This will gracefully stop the agent, causing it to leave the Consul datacenter and shut down.

Is Consul a load balancer?

Consul is a free and open source tool that provides service discovery, health checking, load balancing, and a globally distributed key-value store. ... This is the job of the load balancing layer.

Do you need a client to run consul?

• A client must be running on every node in the Consul datacenter that runs services, since clients are the source of truth about service health. When you're ready to go into production you can find more guidance on production deployment of servers and clients in our Deployment Guide.

How does the members command run against consul?

• The members command runs against the Consul client, which gets its information via gossip protocol. The information that the client has is eventually consistent, but at any point in time its view of the world may not exactly match the state on the servers.

How often should I run consul in production?

• In order to make sure that Consul's state is preserved even if a server fails, you should always run either three or five servers in production. The odd number of servers (and no more than five of them) strikes a balance between performance and failure tolerance.

Do you need a zip to run consul?

• Consul is currently packaged as a zip file. We do not have any near term plans to provide system packages. Once the zip is downloaded, unzip it into any directory. The consul binary inside is all that is necessary to run Consul (or consul.exe for Windows). No additional files are required to run Consul. Copy the binary to anywhere on your system.