Multiple clouds and private datacenters with dynamic IPs, ephemeral containers, dominated by east-west traffic, no clear network perimeters.
CONSUL APPROACH
-Centralized registry to locate any service
-Services discovered and connected with centralized policies
-Network automated in service of applications
-Zero trust network enforced by identity-based security policies
I use the solution for service discovery and orchestration. We have a lot of microservices architecture.
The solution is useful for performing health checks of the applications and services. The documentation is good.
Health check outputs are delayed sometimes. If a service is down for more than five or ten seconds, sometimes the tool is not able to capture it.
I have been using the solution for more than four to five years. I am using the latest version of the solution.
The tool’s stability is good. I rate the stability a nine out of ten. We had some issues. Sometimes, health checks do not give the right outcome.
The tool’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. We have not faced any issues in scaling the server. We run the server behind an autoscaling group. Our backup and restore mechanism is very strong. Specific teams in our organization that follow the microservices architecture use the solution a lot. We have less than 20 users.
We were planning to use Istio. Another team in our organization was using Envoy. We were already using the enterprise version of Terraform. So, we decided to use Consul.
The initial setup is moderately easy. I do the configuration using Chef. We deploy the solution on Amazon EC2 instances. Everything is automated. We spent some time in the HA setup. Other than that, it doesn’t take much time.
I take care of the infrastructure. I use Chef for configuration management. I work on multiple technologies. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.
