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Consul is a service mesh. It’s your dynamic service discovery and routing layer. You have systems dynamically allocated in a cluster, they need to reach other s

Consul is a service mesh. It’s your dynamic service discovery and routing layer. You have systems dynamically allocated in a cluster, they need to reach other systems, you ask consul where they are. Vault is secrets and management. Put secret strings in, get secret strings out (if permitted). Most apps need secrets of some type, and vault is normally discovered via consul. Nomad is an application/workload scheduler. You tell it what you need to run and what their memory/cpu requirements are and it finds a space in your physical infrastructure to run that. The apps it runs normally needs secrets from vault and communicate with services discovered via consul. They all are well integrated and build off of each other, kind of like layers an onion where your app services are the outer layer of the onion. Consul failing this badly is like the core of the onion going rotten. There’s not much saving it at that point, you need to grow a new onion from the inside out, but that takes time.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
Thanks for the explanation. I see how that would cause a cascading failure.
colordrops 5y ago
> Consul is a service mesh. It’s your dynamic service discovery and routing layer. How does this differ from DNS?
- lmm 5y ago
  Dynamic-first, better support for failover etc.. It's probably not doing anything that you couldn't build on top of DNS, but it's designed from the ground up for clustered deployments.
- anilgulecha 5y ago
  Really high level, it doesn't. It's an internal dynamic DNS, essentially.
  - zeeZ 5y ago
    One of their primary query interfaces actually even is DNS.
- foota 5y ago
  I think service discovery is typically related to e.g., request routing in a way that DNS isn't. DNS could probably replace a lot of the ways service discovery is used today, but it would be a very non-typical setup, which is arguably worse than the custom things people use for it today.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  DNS gets cached all up and down the stack. Your OS, routers, application libraries and probably even your application code might cache it. Consul allows you to have it handle the caching, and be notified when a service goes away so it won’t return that address to your application.
- xxs 5y ago
  the thing can even provide dns... but it has fancy interfaces and an http endpoint. Technically you could do everything with dns just fine. Even if consul provides some sort of liveness (due to latency and concurrency it means little), I can't think of a usable case where the clients won't have retries and ability to maintain multiple open sockets, etc.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Consul's notion of a service includes port numbers, and while I'm sure you could hack something up using DNS txt records and default port numbers, it's an important distinction because it means multiple instances running on one box can easily be discovered.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with Consul specifically, but service meshes I am familiar with give you a lot more than just mapping of service names to dynamic IPs. They bundle things like TLS termination, reverse proxying, network policy enforcement, automatic certificate provisioning and key rotation, firewalls potentially aware of anything from layer 3 to layer 7. Where I think companies are going about this wrong sometimes is thinking having their networks be software-defined and handled by some all-in-one product suite means they no longer need network engineers and can they just rely entirely on application developers who specialize in general programming and fall back to vendor support contracts if anything gets too confusing. Admittedly, there's some self interest speaking there, because I work as a consulting engineer for one of these vendors where we go way beyond "support" to embed full time in external product teams with a dependency on our products (though we also offer basic support for companies that think they can get away with it). But to my mind, no software suite can let you get away with not needing any kind of IT ops at all. Smaller companies may assess that the risk is worth it to focus solely on product, but as far as I can tell, Roblox is not a small company (or shouldn't be, given the traffic scale of their platform).
bsenftner 5y ago
This dynamic service terminology sounds very familiar for someone with a few years in the feature film VFX/Animation industries - however, it would not surprise me if Consol/Vault/Nomad were created without a review of similar situations and solutions in other industries. For those unaware, the feature film VFX/Animation industry has been global and performing large scale technologically ambitious projects requiring multi-company tech collaboration for decades. And not just with code, with assets too: visual assets of all kinds, audio in every possible form, and in some cases legal documents with new approaches to industry issues. Plus these media studios tend to have proprietary workflows, so there is very sophisticated file formats to contain all these information in agnostic manners. All this deep collaboration across creative technical organizations that do not trust one another has developed scalable solutions which the web and formal software development is completely unaware.
- codemonkey-zeta 5y ago
  My mind is continually blown when I read about the sheer volume of innovation from the animation industry over the last 3 decades. I would love to learn more about these scalable solutions you're talking about though, since I'm not familiar with them. Do you have any pointers?
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    I've not worked in VFX since '02, but I was both at Rhythm & Hues Studios through multiple VFX Oscars as well as an early 3D graphics researcher during the 80's. I have no idea which tools are still around. For example, a film compositor I know that is now dead and was revolutionary, called Shake: it pioneered both off loading heavy compute tasks to the GPU (not just graphics, but what is called scientific computing now) and it hid the GCC Compiler inside itself and used a macro-transformed version of C as it's "scripting language" that was actually hot-loaded C++ dlls compiled on the fly. It was also the first "node based programming environment" with graphical nodes the end-users connect with splines to define the I/O between the nodes. If you are seriously interested, find someone working in the industry today and ask them. That industry has been changing a lot. Since I left the VFX/Animation fields have been moving towards more framework-like production environments, similar to how the web uses frameworks. The issue with these frameworks is they define the tasks to be performed, and those tasks are simplistic and rigid - meaning the actual production work has eliminated in as many places as possible the requirement for an art degree. The VFX/Animation industries are driving production towards something approaching more and more the work of being a burger flipper. The processes are being standardized and reduced in complexity so the studios can hire non-artists, they can hire anyone and work them like an automobile assembly line. Twenty years ago this was starting, and that is when I left.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

Thanks for the explanation. I see how that would cause a cascading failure.

colordrops 5y ago

> Consul is a service mesh. It’s your dynamic service discovery and routing layer. How does this differ from DNS?

lmm 5y ago
Dynamic-first, better support for failover etc.. It's probably not doing anything that you couldn't build on top of DNS, but it's designed from the ground up for clustered deployments.
anilgulecha 5y ago
Really high level, it doesn't. It's an internal dynamic DNS, essentially.
- zeeZ 5y ago
  One of their primary query interfaces actually even is DNS.
foota 5y ago
I think service discovery is typically related to e.g., request routing in a way that DNS isn't. DNS could probably replace a lot of the ways service discovery is used today, but it would be a very non-typical setup, which is arguably worse than the custom things people use for it today.
withinboredom 5y ago
DNS gets cached all up and down the stack. Your OS, routers, application libraries and probably even your application code might cache it. Consul allows you to have it handle the caching, and be notified when a service goes away so it won’t return that address to your application.
xxs 5y ago
the thing can even provide dns... but it has fancy interfaces and an http endpoint. Technically you could do everything with dns just fine. Even if consul provides some sort of liveness (due to latency and concurrency it means little), I can't think of a usable case where the clients won't have retries and ability to maintain multiple open sockets, etc.
- fragmede 5y ago
  Consul's notion of a service includes port numbers, and while I'm sure you could hack something up using DNS txt records and default port numbers, it's an important distinction because it means multiple instances running on one box can easily be discovered.
nonameiguess 5y ago
I'm not familiar with Consul specifically, but service meshes I am familiar with give you a lot more than just mapping of service names to dynamic IPs. They bundle things like TLS termination, reverse proxying, network policy enforcement, automatic certificate provisioning and key rotation, firewalls potentially aware of anything from layer 3 to layer 7. Where I think companies are going about this wrong sometimes is thinking having their networks be software-defined and handled by some all-in-one product suite means they no longer need network engineers and can they just rely entirely on application developers who specialize in general programming and fall back to vendor support contracts if anything gets too confusing. Admittedly, there's some self interest speaking there, because I work as a consulting engineer for one of these vendors where we go way beyond "support" to embed full time in external product teams with a dependency on our products (though we also offer basic support for companies that think they can get away with it). But to my mind, no software suite can let you get away with not needing any kind of IT ops at all. Smaller companies may assess that the risk is worth it to focus solely on product, but as far as I can tell, Roblox is not a small company (or shouldn't be, given the traffic scale of their platform).

bsenftner 5y ago

This dynamic service terminology sounds very familiar for someone with a few years in the feature film VFX/Animation industries - however, it would not surprise me if Consol/Vault/Nomad were created without a review of similar situations and solutions in other industries. For those unaware, the feature film VFX/Animation industry has been global and performing large scale technologically ambitious projects requiring multi-company tech collaboration for decades. And not just with code, with assets too: visual assets of all kinds, audio in every possible form, and in some cases legal documents with new approaches to industry issues. Plus these media studios tend to have proprietary workflows, so there is very sophisticated file formats to contain all these information in agnostic manners. All this deep collaboration across creative technical organizations that do not trust one another has developed scalable solutions which the web and formal software development is completely unaware.

codemonkey-zeta 5y ago
My mind is continually blown when I read about the sheer volume of innovation from the animation industry over the last 3 decades. I would love to learn more about these scalable solutions you're talking about though, since I'm not familiar with them. Do you have any pointers?
- bsenftner 5y ago
  I've not worked in VFX since '02, but I was both at Rhythm & Hues Studios through multiple VFX Oscars as well as an early 3D graphics researcher during the 80's. I have no idea which tools are still around. For example, a film compositor I know that is now dead and was revolutionary, called Shake: it pioneered both off loading heavy compute tasks to the GPU (not just graphics, but what is called scientific computing now) and it hid the GCC Compiler inside itself and used a macro-transformed version of C as it's "scripting language" that was actually hot-loaded C++ dlls compiled on the fly. It was also the first "node based programming environment" with graphical nodes the end-users connect with splines to define the I/O between the nodes. If you are seriously interested, find someone working in the industry today and ask them. That industry has been changing a lot. Since I left the VFX/Animation fields have been moving towards more framework-like production environments, similar to how the web uses frameworks. The issue with these frameworks is they define the tasks to be performed, and those tasks are simplistic and rigid - meaning the actual production work has eliminated in as many places as possible the requirement for an art degree. The VFX/Animation industries are driving production towards something approaching more and more the work of being a burger flipper. The processes are being standardized and reduced in complexity so the studios can hire non-artists, they can hire anyone and work them like an automobile assembly line. Twenty years ago this was starting, and that is when I left.