A Consul Story: To 20,000 Nodes and Beyond

This talk will look at how Bloomberg is deploying Consul in our diverse software/hardware environment. We will cover the challenges we faced when deploying Consul into an already established network with 20,000+ nodes, different architectures, operating systems, and thousands of different machine types. Our story starts with designing for nodes that cannot run a local Consul agent due to hardware, architecture, and/or network incompatibility. We will share experiences from our 2,000+ node scale tests and what we learned from these and other deployments in our data centers. We will then talk about the new Consul ESM (External Service Monitor) to focus on how and where it can add value by solving compatibility issues. We will briefly cover Consul's exposed Raft tunables and how they may be used to add an additional layer of high availability -- without sacrificing performance -- in order to add tie-breaker nodes in a geographically distributed cluster. We will conclude our story by talking about our latest project: how we are building service discovery as a SaaS platform with Consul and the Consul-ESM. --

HashiCorp is the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. The HashiCorp software suite enables organizations to adopt consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. HashiCorp open source tools Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Boundary, and Waypoint are downloaded tens of millions of times each year and are broadly adopted by the Global 2000. Enterprise versions of these products enhance the open source tools with features that promote collaboration, operations, governance, and multi-data center functionality.

Twitter: @hashicorp