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.
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Now, the downside of Consul is that it seems etcd has much more momentum.
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.
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.
[+] [-] krallin|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] progrium|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meatmanek|11 years ago|reply
Another mature option for service discovery that this port doesn't mention is AirBnB's SmartStack: https://github.com/airbnb/synapse and 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...