3 ms·

How have people's experiences been with Consul in general? Any pitfalls? We're rolling it out shortly for service discovery and some limited key/value storage (

• t-writescode 6y ago
  I have very limited experience with Consul and Vault. I do know that the older versions of these services, when they were CLI, were very unpleasant, especially the Vault. Consul didn't immediately meet our needs since it has no form of an audit trail, so the purposes I'd hoped to use it for weren't really fulfilled. I did like what the service seemed to provide and how it provided it. Just be warned that the lack of audit trail can be a problem if you want to use it for feature flags, etc. It will still need to be backed by some sort of store, like git.
  • eikenberry 6y ago
    The enterprise (paid) version of Consul 1.8 has audit logging.
• sethammons 6y ago
  The only thing that burned my team on Consul was DNS routing. At high request load, it would not load balance fairly leading to hotspots that could lead to a node falling over and lead to a thundering herd of node failures. This was several years ago, so maybe they fixed it. I believe it was something to do with a time component to the routing, likely some ill-though-out optimization that failed at scale (one node would be hot for some number of seconds, then some other node would take its place). We got around it by making a routing library that used the (non-exposed) Watcher API to build the membership info for the cluster in memory for each node (instead of relying on DNS), and then did round-robin on the cluster for routing each subsequent request.