Magellan is a .NET Standard 2.1 library for services discovery using Consul. It is not a full client for the Consul API, but rather a client offering opinionated methods for service discovery and configuration in a microservice architecture. It's goal is to use Consul to minimize the effort needed to connect and configure microservices in a distributed system.
Magellan is in early development.
Magellan assumes you are running several services in a distributed system, each of which potentially having numerous instances. It is designed for a system in which each host with potentially numerous services and instances runs one Consul agent. In the context of Magellan, the following vocabulary is used:
- service: A type of service, identified by a name (like
MyUserAuthenticationService). A service can have several instances on the same or different hosts. - service instance: A specific instance of a given service. It is identified by the service name, as well as the IP address and port it is available at.
- healthy service: A service which has at least one healthy service instance.
- healthy service instance: A service instance which passes all Consul health checks associated with it.
- local agent: The Consul agent running on the host being considered or the host of the service instance being considered.
Magellan allows to:
- register service instances with health checks
- check health of services and service instances
- query for an instance of a service to use