Clarification required on consul_service, consul_agent_service, consul_catalog_entry resources

[blalor]

From looking at the documentation, it's unclear how a user should choose between the above three resources. Furthermore, both consul_service and consul_agent_service appear to do effectively the same thing, although the docs for consul_service indicate that registering a service with the catalog is something intended for the future. I believe the design of consul_service is confusing: if you configure the provider to use a non-local agent (such as consul.service.consul:8500 or some other mechanism that could non-deterministically choose a different agent on every Terraform plan or apply), subsequent Terraform invocations can fail if they're unable to find a service that was registered with a different agent previously.

[sean-]

@blalor Entirely valid points, and yeah, I agree. It's one of the reasons the "consul_nodes" doesn't exist and instead I named it consul_catalog_nodes (same with "consul_self" vs consul_agent_self). The lack of clarity between "catalog" vs "agent" is a common sticking point, but the implicit behavior with the missing implementation detail is problematic. I'll update the docs soon. Thank you for highlighting this.

[ghost]

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