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Introduction to Consul
Welcome to the intro guide to Consul! This guide is a the best place to start with Consul. We cover what Consul is, what problems it can solve, how it compares to existing software, and a quick start for using Consul. If you are already familiar with the basics of Consul, the documentation provides more of a reference for all available features.
What is Consul?
Consul has multiple components, but as a whole, it is tool for managing and coordinating infrastructure. It provides several key features:
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Service Discovery: Clients of Consul can provide a service, such as
apiormysql, and other clients can use Consul to discover providers of a given service. Using either DNS or HTTP, applications can easily find the services they depend upon. -
Health Checking: Consul clients can provide any number of health checks, either associated with a given service ("is the webserver returning 200 OK"), or with the local node ("is memory utilization below 90%"). This information can be used by an operator to monitor cluster health, and it is used by the service discovery components to route traffic away from unhealthy hosts.
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Key/Value Store: Applications can make use of Consul's hierarchical key/value store for any number of purposes including dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election, etc. The simple HTTP API makes dead easy to use.
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Multi Datacenter: Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. This means users of Consul do not have to worry about building additional layers of abstraction to grow to multiple regions.
See the use cases page for a list of concrete use cases built on top of the features Consul provides. See the page on how Consul compares to other software to see just how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Or continue onwards with the getting started guide to get Consul up and running and see how it works.