Load balancers aren’t efficient in a dynamic environment where we scale services up or down. Consul uses a registry to keep a real-time list of services, their location, and their health. Services query the registry to discover the location of upstream services and then connect directly. This allows services to scale up/down and gracefully handle failure

Installation

To Install Consul on Ubuntu

apt-get update
cd /usr/local/bin
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul/1.2.2/consul_1.2.2_linux_amd64.zip
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul/1.2.2/consul_1.2.2_SHA256SUMS
sha256sum consul_1.2.2_linux_amd64.zip
grep "consul_1.2.2_linux_amd64.zip" consul_1.2.2_SHA256SUMS
rm consul_1.2.2_SHA256SUMS
unzip *.zip
rm *.zip

## Refer to https://www.consul.io/docs/agent/options.html#ports for required ports and optional
ufw allow 8300
ufw allow 8301
ufw allow 8302
ufw allow 8400
ufw allow 8500
ufw allow 8600

mkdir /tmp/consul_services
mkdir /tmp/consul

Run Consul for Development

Create a system service for consul nano /etc/systemd/system/consul.service

[Unit]
Description=Consul
Documentation=https://www.consul.io/

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/consul agent -dev -ui -client $CLIENT_SERVER_IP_HOST
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
LimitNOFILE=65536

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start consul.service

#scaling #service discovery #consul #amazon web services