Joel, we chose consul for a few reasons. First, I wanted a service discovery solution that could work with our legacy architectures as well as any new projects we run on mesos. In addition, I wanted a way to bootstrap the mesos cluster setup/configuration (masters and slaves) such that when they are provisioned, they will be auto-configured using data in consul. Think zk values, quorum, etc. I’ll be working on a solution for this very soon. Lastly, I really like how consul supports health-checks, which we will leverage heavily to ensure that only “healthy” services are actually registered. Like you mentioned, consul is very fast in updating the service info and that is very important as well.
Hope that helps,
-Phil
Pablo Lalloni on 21 Jun 14"Consul has multiple components, but as a whole, it is a tool for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure. It provides several key features: Service Discovery: Clients of Consul can provide a service, such as api or mysql, 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. 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 it easy to use. 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. Consul is designed to be friendly to both the DevOps community and application developers, making it perfect for modern, elastic infrastructures."
