Consul started in 2014 when Kubernetes was also entering the market. It is a first-class citizen for configuring and discovering services, especially when the infrastructure (Compute, Storage, and Network) is dynamic, which is a combination of Kubernetes clusters and VMs in multiple data centers.
The following table will give you a clear picture of the traditional and dynamic infrastructures:
Traditional infrastructure | Dynamic infrastructure | |
What is it? | In a traditional infrastructure, there is static connectivity in an insecure flat network protected by firewall rules. |
In a dynamic infrastructure, ephemeral workloads with dynamic IP addresses can run on any machine in a zero-trust network. |
How does it handle network traffic? | Traffic is routed through a hardware or software load balancer across multiple applications (horizontal scalability... |