Consul Service Discovery

In a changing infrastructure, it is difficult to maintain a list of services and their instances, let alone interconnect, monitor, and configure them across different infrastructures. Distributing applications across different platforms, whether containers, VM, baremetal, hybrid and multicloud, further complicates the problem. One approach to dealing with this is service discovery.

Audience

• IT systems architects
• Platform engineers and administrators
• Application Developers and Devops Operators
• Devops organizations with many deployments and a changing infrastructure on different platforms
• Organizations that try to decompose monolithic applications
• Organizations that are considering or already running applications in a hybrid or multicloud environment

Goals

• What is consul and when (not) to use it.
• How consul works in practice and what problems it tries to solve.
• Show how to deploy consul to running systems in production quality.
• Demonstrate how Consul will simplify the deployment of microservice and devops practices.
• How consul solves a multicluster or hybrid cloud

Outline

Day 1

Architecture and deployment

• Introduction to microservice and distributed applications
• Why consul - static architecture vs dynamic
• Basic architecture of consul - service catalog

Workshop

• Getting acquainted with the demo environment
• Installation - server and agent
• Registration services and healtchecky
• Cluster control and solution of operational situations
• Integration with kubernetes
  
  

Service discovery and configuration registry

• Working with the catalog - access via API
• Consul as a DNS balancer
• Key-value and watche
• Configure services using templates

Workshop

• Haproxy automation from consul content
• Application feature flags using templating
• Integration with upstream dns using dnsmasq

Day 2

Security a visibility

• Multiplatform mesh - architecture
• Envoy proxy
• TLS, metrics
• Advanced traffic routing to services
• ACL and permission control in the cluster

Workshop

• Turn on consul connect
• Adding an envoy proxy to services
• Blue / Green deployment
• Restrictions on rights and work with tokens
• Connection to prometheus
  
  

Other uses and maintenance

• Backup, diagnostics and monitoring
• Advanced work with healtchecks
• Optimization and hardening, hacks
• Traps and risks
• Geocluster

Prerequisites

• Basic knowledge how to work with command line (bash)

Technical requirements (BYOD)

• PC with Windows/Linux/MacOS, ssh klient