go-callvis VS consul

Dependency plugins and tools are automatically installed after executing the command: protoc-gen-go, protoc-gen-go-grpc, protoc-gen-validate, protoc-gen-gotag, protoc-gen-go-gin, protoc-gen-go-rpc-tmpl, protoc-gen-openapiv2, protoc-gen-doc, golangci-lint, swag, go-callvis.

Consul, HashiCorp's distributed system tool, isn't just a one-trick pony for service discovery—it's a Swiss Army knife that also handles configuration management and network segmentation.

I had a distaste for Nomad before the rug pull[1], but hopefully no serious person would voluntarily choose Nomad after that stunt. Doubly so that going with the Nomad ecosystem mandates self-hosting as one cannot $(aws elastic-nomad create-cluster). I was similarly surprised that HashiCorp didn't even offer "you pay for compute but we will administer your control plane" since both the "community" and the "enterprise" links from the front page both say "self-managed"

I will be super curious to see if IBM Cloud actually does ship $(ibm-cloud-cli create-nomad)

1: I also didn't realize they rug pulled Consul, too; that's just cruel https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/v1.20.5/LICENSE

No need for NGINX reloads: Since NGINX queries the Consul Go API client for healthy services on each request, there’s no need to reload NGINX whenever a service moves between nodes or when new instances are added.

When a backend starts or stops, something needs to update, whether it’s Consul, kube-proxy, ELB, or otherwise. To stop a worker without incurring failures, you need to prevent the load balancer from sending new requests and then finishing existing ones.

Consul - To set up secure network communication via mTLS, service location and certificate issuance

Hashicorp Consul

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.