Microservices in Consul

Question

I'm interested in knowing if I can use Consul to solve the following issues:

1) Can Consul be used to load balance microservices? For instance, if I put console on the server that hosts my API gateway, can it be used to monitor all microservices it has discovered and load balance if I have two of the same microservice?

2) Can Consul be used at the microservice level to spin up instances as needed? Essentially, I'd like to not use IIS and find an alternative.

3) If for whatever reason Consul monitors a microservice as offline, can it attempt to start it up again? Or force a shut down of a microservice for whatever reason?

If Consul software can't solve these issues, is there other alternatives?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Consul DNS can provide a simple way for you to load balance services. It's especially powerful if you combine it with Consul Prepared Queries and health checks.

Consul is best suited for monitoring services (via health checks) but you can use consul watch to trigger events if a service suddenly becomes unavailable.

Hashicorp (the company behind Consul) offers another tool called Nomad. Unlike Consul, Nomad is designed to run services (called jobs) and restart them if necessary.

Nomad works best if you tell it where to find Consul. This enables automatic service registration for any task Nomad launches, including deregistering it if you instruct Nomad to stop running that task. Health checks are supported as well.