What a cluster!
If you've just set up your AWS account and installed Terraform, I can imagine you are ravenously awaiting the moment to fire up a cluster. Don't worry—as Robert Plant always used to say, your time is gonna come. First, we're going to dig a bit deeper into the mechanisms employed within the Consul cluster operation itself. I may have mentioned this before, but one of the core applications of Consul is to facilitate and enable a simpler and more secure communication mechanism among all of the services within the network. Consul would never be able to facilitate external communication if it didn't have a handle on its internal communication. So, let's look at the communication mechanisms and flows within the entire Consul cluster, both servers and clients.
Starting with the servers, what is the fundamental information they need to share and communicate? Here's what's required:
- Leader election—After all, without...