Build Stuff'16 Lithuania

Service discovery and configuration has been an operational issue since Service Oriented Architecture became popular. With the advent of Microservices the problem has become even more acute. Previous solutions included technologies such as UDDI and load balancing, but this presented issues with scaling. Consul from HashiCorp claims to make this easy, but what technologies and principals did they use to build Consul that allow them to make that claim? In this session I will examine the 2 of the main pieces of research used to underpin Consul, the SWIM and RAFT protocols, and how they tackle the problems suffered by more traditional solutions, and also discuss how some design decisions in Consul make it far easier to integrate unobtrusively than previous technologies.