Chapter 7: Animate Me
We've already talked at great length about the Consul cluster's awareness of the services and applications deployed within the system, along with their corresponding health. Why should Consul keep all of this information to itself? A big part of the successful existence of any network, human or machine, is the sharing of information. Throughout this chapter, we're going to look at a few ways that Consul is able to share that information with third-party components in order to improve our lives through automation:
- Key/value (KV) store – Consul utilizes the distributed KV store to share information among Consul nodes, but this can also be used by humans and machines to share data and directives throughout the cluster.
- Watches and handlers – In Chapter 5, Little Bo Peep Lost Her Service, we saw how Consul watches and handlers are able to announce specific changes to the service status. In this chapter, we'll see how this...