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Consul, a new tool for service discovery and configuration

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Re: Consul, a new tool for service discovery and configuration

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consul is a totally different thing to Cassandra. Consul could be built on top of Cassandra, but it would not provide any advantages. Why would you want to maintain a separate datastore? Consul is a single static binary that uses around 11MB of RAM. Cassandra is a complex distributed datastore that requires the JVM and uses many gigabytes of RAM.

Why would you want to maintain a separate service discovery cluster?

Cassandra is not a service discovery cluster...

I think you're missing the point here. I don't know what else can be explained better.

Re: Consul, a new tool for service discovery and configuration

#62
post #57

This sounds very impressive, at the risk of breaking the chorus of awesome: what problem does this actually solve? Discovery: The consul page alleges that it provides a DNS compatible DNS alternative for peer discovery but is unclear as to what improvements it offers other than 'health checks', with the documentation leaving failure resolution processes unspecified (as far as I can see) thus mandating a hyper-simplis…

For the record, Raft does mandate what happens in that split-brain scenario. Neither side will be able to elect a leader, and writes will halt. Electing a leader requires a quorum.

OK, thanks for clarifying. Still, the point being illustrated was that a drop-in solution is rarely feasible... ie. the common HA cluster feature of redundant link-layer communications paths does add significant protection against availability loss such as the situation you describe. It's not just a software thing.
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