

Consul Service Discovery with Docker - progrium
http://progrium.com/blog/2014/08/20/consul-service-discovery-with-docker/

======
krallin
One small thing that makes Consul exciting (especially when compared to etcd)
is its -bootstrap-expect flag [0].

It's the recommended way to stand up a Consul cluster without a risk of
causing split brain if it turns out multiple nodes are coming up at the exact
same time, and it achieves that without an external / pre-existing
coordination service.

In comparison, etcd's recommended way to bootstrap a cluster is to use CoreOS'
"discovery" service, which is great, but does constitute one extra dependency.

\--

Now, the downside of Consul is that it seems etcd has _much_ more momentum.

    
    
      [0]: http://www.consul.io/docs/guides/bootstrapping.html

~~~
progrium
Yeah, and actually, that bootstrapping was previously a manual process, but
thanks to DigitalOcean I had my summer intern Robert (@robxu9) implement and
submit the patch for -bootstrap-expect.

------
meatmanek
Consul is pretty neat, and in my experiments with it, it's really easy to spin
up and modify a cluster. It seems like they really thought through the
procedures.

Another mature option for service discovery that this port doesn't mention is
AirBnB's SmartStack:
[https://github.com/airbnb/synapse](https://github.com/airbnb/synapse) and
[https://github.com/airbnb/nerve](https://github.com/airbnb/nerve). Here's a
talk from DockerCon about using SmartStack and Docker:
[http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/dockercon-video-building-a-
sm...](http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/dockercon-video-building-a-smarter-
application-stack/)

