Consul Archives - DEVOPS DONE RIGHT

How to Setup Consul through the OSM Ansible Role

Are you searching for service discovery or a service mesh tool for a distributed environment?

Did you find any with easy installation? Not yet!! Think fast….It’s just a piece of cake.YES! NO! Calm down because I got it !!!!

A few days back we got a requirement where we had to setup multiple services on multiple servers and in a cluster mode….So now the question arises how will the services be auto discovered? how will we get to know the health check of the service? and above all how to restrict users on different services. After a lot of research, I came across a tool named as consul. But now another stumbling block arises HOW TO SETUP IT?

Your answer might be just go ahead and download the binary on every server, if that’s what you’re thinking…then STOP! Because doing it manually on plenty of servers is time-consuming and also not an efficient way. So, I thought of using a configuration management tool that is none other than ansible. Then there were roles that were already present in the market but some have the hard coded encryption key, some were not generating the bootstrap token and also they were not easy to understand. None of the roles fulfilled the requirement.

So, I thought of creating an ansible role with features like, enabling ACL and generating a bootstrap token, and an encryption key with easy-to-understand language.

In this blog, I have explained the OT-OSM consul ansible role.

Without any delay let’s get started!!!

Now you might be thinking what is consul?

Autoscaling in Nomad Cluster

We are living in the microservice era, where we have a number of applications to support a business model. But our application success cannot be determined by the features only, it should have a scalable model as well. Otherwise, something like this would happen:-

When we generally talk about the scaling in the microservices, people think that applications that are running inside Kubernetes as containers. Since Kubernetes has its own method of autoscaling using the metrics-server, we don’t have to worry about the scaling of the applications inside it.

Learn How to Control Consul Resources Using ACL

When we talk about service mesh, consul is one of the open-source tools which is widely used as a service discovery for multiple ephemeral or non-ephemeral resources. There are multiple consuls [service mesh] alternatives which are used as a service discovery but we won’t be discussing service discovery & alternative comparisons here.

If we talk about consul, it is not only used as a service mesh but also provides multiple options and features other than a service mesh. Yes, you heard it right, this lad can do lots of things that we didn’t know or haven’t explored yet.

Let’s talk about some of the options or features provided by the consul and further, we will discuss some of the aspects and impact of things provided by the consul.