World’s quickest demo of consul

"What is service discovery?" and "Should I investigate consul?" are questions for another day.

Today is the day for the world’s quickest demonstration* of advertising a master-slave-slave redis cluster across consul.

*No effort was made to verify this claim.

Step-by-step:

1. It shows a running cluster of consul servers
2. Sadly, there is no redis service available. What are we to do?
3. Deploy a cluster of redis VMs using BOSH. The deployment includes the consul agent on each VM.
4. Watch consul members as each of the new redis servers join as consul clients
5. Celebrate as each of the redis VMs is now advertising itself as a redis service, tagged as either ‘master’ or ‘slave’.

If you’re now interested in consul? Awesome. Read their getting started docs as they are really good.

If you’re a BOSH user (the tool used to boot the redis cluster in the example), then here are the BOSH releases used in the demo:

• redis-boshrelease – Now upgraded support consul announcements
• consul-boshrelease – Use this to either deploy a cluster of consul servers; OR upgrade an existing BOSH deployment to advertise or discover services (a la redis-boshrelease above).