Consul
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Consul is HashiCorp's tool for service discovery, health checking, and configuration. It keeps track of where all your services are running and whether they're healthy. If a service goes down, Consul knows immediately and stops routing traffic to it. It's the switchboard operator for your infrastructure.
Real Talk
Consul is a service mesh and service discovery tool by HashiCorp. It provides service registration, health checking, KV store, multi-datacenter support, and a service mesh with mTLS. Services register via agents, and discovery happens through DNS or HTTP API. It uses the Raft consensus algorithm for leader election and data replication.
When You'll Hear This
"Consul health checks detected the failing instance and removed it from the pool." / "We use Consul's KV store for dynamic configuration across all services."
Related Terms
Health Check
A Health Check is an automatic 'are you alive?' ping your infrastructure sends to your app regularly.
Service Discovery
Service discovery is how microservices find each other without hardcoding addresses.
Service Mesh
In a microservices system, every service needs to handle retries, timeouts, mutual TLS, and send traces. You could code all that in every service.