Spaceflight uses HashiCorp Consul for Service Discovery and Runtime Configuration in their Hub-and-Spoke Network Architecture

This is a guest post by Jay Christopherson, principal engineer, DevOps, at Spaceflight Industries. Spaceflight is revolutionizing the business of space flight by delivering a new model for accessing space. A comprehensive launch service and mission management provider, the company provides a straightforward and cost-effective suite of products and services including state-of-the-art satellite infrastructure, rideshare launch offerings, and global communications networks that enable commercial and government entities to achieve their mission goals, on time and on budget. A service offering of Spaceflight Industries in Seattle Washington, Spaceflight provides its services through a global network of partners, ground stations, and launch vehicle providers. We had two main challenges facing us as we determined how to design the computing infrastructure to support our business applications: how we should handle distributed runtime changes and service discovery. We need distributed changes as we deploy remote satellite communications ground stations (spokes) around the world, but which are all managed from a central location (hub). Changes made from a central location need to be distributed out to one or more remote ground stations in an automated fashion. As for service discovery, we build and deploy quite often and we needed to make sure that changes to services in our infrastructure are detected and updated as quickly as possible without any manual updates. These are the reasons we looked at HashiCorp Consul.