Major Tom, are you OK?

Whenever we deal with communications, there is almost always some level of feedback that is required to ensure that the receiver is available. This is the entire instigator of the phrases we all know so well, such as can you hear me now?. Anybody who has had to deal with network load balancers or system monitoring should be no stranger to the term health check. This is exactly what Consul can employ within every service definition. Although a health check isn't a required part of a service definition, I can't imagine why anybody would want to define and deploy a service without one!

In the realm of network load balancers or system monitoring, health checks were defined and orchestrated by some centralized form of intelligence. This means that if a load balancer managed 10 services running across 100 different nodes, the load balancer would need to track 1,000 health checks. This can not only cause some scaling issues as the services grow but it also...