consul-template VS consul

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code tool. It is designed by HashiCorp and written in Go Programming Language. Terraform is used to automate the creation of DevOps infrastructure and tasks. Terraform provisions and configures your DevOps infrastructure. It spins up new servers, creates load balancers, and node groups, and performs network configurations. Terraform is mostly applied to provision resources on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It can automate and provision infrastructure on any cloud platform. We will use Terraform to set up an Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster that has all the necessary cloud resources.

It can be time-consuming to create and manage the infrastructure that drives your software applications as they grow and become larger. Also, what about ongoing updates and releases of new features? Luckily, there is a solution to this problem in the form of a tool designed by Hashicorp called Terraform. This allows us to define our infrastructure in a central configuration file without having to create it on every provider platform we use.

HashiCorp Sentinel: Sentinel is a PAC tool developed by HashiCorp that can be used in tools such as Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. Sentinel supports writing rules in programming languages such as HCL to automate the enforcement of security and compliance policies.

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool (IAC) created by HashiCorp that lets you automate cloud and on-prem resources. It uses configuration files written in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to declare resources (infrastructure objects) and define dependencies between them. To put it simply, this tool allows you to write a few configuration files and build a whole system’s architecture on the cloud by running a couple of commands. I found this to be a more efficient alternative to clicking through a console to create resources manually.

It was clear back in 2021 that Lob needed to consolidate how we run code and none of our current tools were up to the task; it wasn’t a matter of if Lob would upgrade to something new, but when. The Platform team kicked off a research project to find Lob’s next service platform. Forever ago (back in 2019) we investigated migrating to Kubernetes, a popular but notoriously difficult-to-manage tool for this sort of thing, but that project fizzled out for many reasons, forcing us to consider something else. We chose Nomad which offers a comparable feature set to Kubernetes in a much more streamlined package. Nomad is developed by HashiCorp, a leader in the DevOps space, and is used by companies like Pandora, Cloudflare, Internet Archive, and Roblox.

If however, you have an application service that needs support for 2+ ports, because you know, Kubernetes supports this, I would recommend avoiding Consul Connect, as it is not functional to meet minimum requirements for a service mesh. Perhaps someday, when Hashicorp prioritizes basic functionality and usability in future version, this product can be considered.

Looks a lot like Hashicorp (a technology company), maybe too similar, and not particularly evocative IMO.

AWS VPC is a simple example. This feature really shines when building reusable infrastructure-as-code for Network Firewall or even Network ACLs. Anything that simplifies something and reduces or eliminates any hacks required to reach a logical outcome is super valuable. Great work finally driving this one home HashiCorp.

The JHipster scaffolded sample application has a gateway application and two microservices. It uses Consul for service discovery and centralized configuration.

Service Discovery: Microservices need to discover and communicate with each other dynamically. Service discovery tools like etcd, Consul, or Kubernetes built-in service discovery mechanisms help locate and connect to microservices running on different nodes within the infrastructure.

After some research and testing, I landed on using Consul and Fabio as the demo infrastructure. Of course, there is a myriad of other options to accomplish this task, but because of the low configuration and ease of use, I was impressed with this pairing. Both projects are mature and well-supported, and very flexible--just because you can run them with low configuration, doesn't mean you have to. I wanted to keep this demo constrained, but the exercise did get me excited about exploring things further: circuit breakers, traffic splitting, and more complex service meshes.

The goal is to be able to use Consul SD configurations to allow for retrieving scrape targets from consul. Is this possible? Can anyone provide an example? Thank you!!

https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/pull/12080 - this should be the Consul issue that brought down Roblox

The Consul collector is production ready! Consul by HashiCorp is a powerful and complex identity-based networking solution, which is not trivial to monitor. We were lucky to have the assistance of HashiCorp itself in this endeavor, which resulted in a monitoring solution of exceptional quality. Look for common blog posts and announcements in the coming weeks!

Changed the service discovery to Consul, since this is the default in JHipster 8.

In another effort to standardize development and operations, Lob has just wrapped up our container orchestration migration from Convox to HashiCorp’s Nomad, led by Senior Platform Engineer Elijah Voigt. In this new ecosystem, one feature available to us is Consul Service Mesh (a feature of Consul, which is part of our Lob Nomad stack).

Service registry and discovery etcd, consul, nacos