Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services. This charm deploys a Consul server instance to a public cloud that join with other Consul servers to form a fully functioning cluster.
Key Features:
- Service Discovery: Clients of Consul can provide a service, while other clients can use Consul to discover providers of a given service. The service discovery can be accessed via DNS or HTTP so applications can easily find the services they depend upon.
- Health Checking: Consul clients can provide any number of health checks, either associated with a given service, or with the local node. This information can be used to monitor cluster heath and is used by service discovery components to route traffic away from unhealthy hosts.
- Key/Value Store: Applications can use Consul's hierarchical key/value store for any number of purposes, including dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election, and more. The simple HTTP API makes the key/value store easy to use.
- Multi Datacenter: Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. Consul grows to multiple regions.
The Consul charm can be deployed from the command line:
juju deploy consul -n 3
To be highly available deploy multiple units of the consul charm. The number of units in the cluster should be odd and the Consul documentation suggests no more than 5 per datacenter.
juju add-unit consul -n 2
Once exposed the Consul web ui is available at http://consul-public-ip:8500/ui
Consul requires up to 5 different ports to work properly, some on TCP, UDP, or both protocols. Below we document the requirements for each port.
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Server RPC (Default 8300). This is used by servers to handle incoming requests from other agents. TCP only. This port is not opened on the public interface.
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Serf LAN (Default 8301). This is used to handle gossip in the LAN. Required by all agents. TCP and UDP. This port is not opened on the public interface.
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Serf WAN (Default 8302). This is used by servers to gossip over the WAN to other servers. TCP and UDP.
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CLI RPC (Default 8400). This is used by all agents to handle RPC from the CLI. TCP only.
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HTTP API (Default 8500). This is used by clients to talk to the HTTP API. TCP only.
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DNS Interface (Default 53). Used to resolve DNS queries. TCP and UDP.
Note not all of these ports are open on the public interface. User must expose the charm through Juju before the ports are available publicly.
Each Consul cluster must have at least one server and ideally no more than 5 per datacenter. All servers participate in the Raft consensus algorithm to ensure that transactions occur in a consistent, linearizable manner. Transactions modify cluster state, which is maintained on all server nodes to ensure availability in the case of node failure. Server nodes also participate in a WAN gossip pool with server nodes in other datacenters. Servers act as gateways to other datacenters and forward traffic as appropriate.
This charm exposes the following configuration values:
bootstrap-expect - The expected servers in the datacenter. Consul server nodes are responsible for running a consensus protocol and storing the cluster state. Before a cluster can service requests, a server node must be elected leader. Bootstrapping is the process of joining the initial server nodes into a cluster. We recommend 3 or 5 total servers per datacenter. A single server deployment is highly discouraged as data loss is inevitable in a failure scenario.
domain - By default, Consul responds to DNS queries in the "consul." domain. This flag can be used to change that domain. All queries in this domain are assumed to be handled by Consul and will not be recursively resolved.
log-level - The level of logging to show after the Consul agent has started.
This defaults to "info". The available log levels are "trace", "debug", "info",
"warn", and "err". Note that you can always connect to an agent via consul monitor and use any log level.
version - The version of Consul software to download and install.
Go to the Consul configuration web page for more information on the configuration options availble in the Consul software.
The original author of this charm is Kapil Thangavelu ( @kapilt ).
The Consul charm maintainers are:
- Charles Butler ( @chuckbutler )
- Matthew Bruzek ( @mbruzek )
- Whit Morriss ( @whitmo )
- Consul website
- Consul documentation
- Consul github
- Bug Tracker: Issue tracker on GitHub Use to report bugs, ask for general help in the IRC or mailing list.
- Mailing list: Consul Google Group
- IRC:
#consulon Freenode - Community tools: Download Consul tools Please check out some of the awesome Consul tooling our amazing community has helped build.