As a clustering and distributed architecture enthusiast, I'm naturally interested in software providing neat ways to coordinate any kind of state/configuration/you-name-it over a large number of machines.
My quest, as many of you I guess, were so far limited to tools like zookeeper (packaged on my overlay but with almost no echo) and doozerd (last commit nearly 6 months ago) which both cover some of the goals listed above with more or less flavors and elegance (sorry guys, JAVA is NOT elegant to me).
I recently heard about consul, a new attempt to solve some of those problems in an interesting way while providing some rich fuctionnalities so I went on giving it a try and naturally started packaging it so others can too.
WTF is consul ?¶
Consul is a few months' old project (and already available on Gentoo !) from the guys making Vagrant. I especially like its datacenter centric architecture, intuitive deployment and its DNS + HTTP API query mechanisms. This sounds promising so far !
This is a descripion taken from the Hashicorp's blog :
Consul is a solution for service discovery and configuration. Consul is completely distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes and services across multiple datacenters.
Some concrete problems Consul solves: finding the services applications need (database, queue, mail server, etc.), configuring services with key/value information such as enabling maintenance mode for a web application, and health checking services so that unhealthy services aren’t used. These are just a handful of important problems Consul addresses.
Consul solves the problem of service discovery and configuration. Built on top of a foundation of rigorous academic research, Consul keeps your data safe and works with the largest of infrastructures. Consul embraces modern practices and is friendly to existing DevOps tooling.
app-admin/consul ?¶
This is a RFC and interest call about the packaging and availability of consul for Gentoo Linux.
The latest version and live ebuilds are present in my overlay so if you are interested, please tell me (here, IRC, email, whatever) and I'll consider adding it to the portage tree.
I want to test it !¶
Now that would be helpful to get some feedback about the usability of the current packaging. So far the ebuild features what I think should cover a lot of use cases :
- full build from sources
- customizable consul agent init script with reload, telemetry and graceful stop support
- web UI built from sources and installation for easy deployment
# layman -a ultrabug
emerge -av consul¶
Hope this interests some of you folks !