Consul B-Sides: Exploring The Powerful Features of Consul You Might Not Have Heard Of

Consul is well known for its service discovery features, but it also has other powerful use cases. These include service configuration and service segmentation—and with segmentation enabled by Consul Connect, Consul is able to function as the control plane of a service mesh.

In this solutions engineering hangout, Russ Parsloe examines some of Consul’s lesser-known features for service configuration, such as semaphores, watches, remote execution, and blocking queries. All of these service configuration features provide operators with a centralized system that can configure application services en masse and at scale.

What you'll learn

• The main functionality of Consul
• Consul's watches feature
• Consul's blocking queries
• Consul's locks
• Consul's remote execution through Consul exec

Outline

• 0:00 — Introduction to Consul

• 7:10 — Consul Connect

• 9:32 — Service configuration features of Consul

• 22:25 — Demo of Consul service configuration features

• 40:32 — Q&A

Additional resources

Public Gist with simple bash scripts used in the demo.