Does Consul use DNS?

One of the primary query interfaces for Consul is DNS. The DNS interface allows applications to make use of service discovery without any high-touch integration with Consul.

Is Consul a service mesh?

Consul is a service mesh solution that offers a software-driven approach to: Security (mTLS & ACLs) Observability. Traffic management.

Does Consul use gossip protocol?

Consul uses a gossip protocol to manage membership and broadcast messages to the cluster. The protocol, membership management, and message broadcasting is provided through the Serf library.

Is Consul A secure?

The Consul agent supports encrypting all of its network traffic. The exact method of encryption is described on the encryption security page. There are two separate encryption systems, one for gossip traffic and one for HTTP + RPC.

Does Consul do load balancing?

Consul implements load balancing by automating Envoy configuration to reflect the selected approach.

How does Consul Connect work?

The core of Connect is based on mutual TLS. Connect provides each service with an identity encoded as a TLS certificate. This certificate is used to establish and accept connections to and from other services. The identity is encoded in the TLS certificate in compliance with the SPIFFE X.

What is the purpose of consul?

Consul provides many different features that are used to provide consistent and available information about your infrastructure. This includes service and node discovery mechanisms, a tagging system, health checks, consensus-based election routines, system-wide key/value storage, and more.

How does consul Connect work?

Is Consul a database?

Database Communication Consul acts as a DNS server, so when you query it via DNS, it will return the most available IP for the name you are querying.

Does Kafka use gossip protocol?

Notes on Kafka – The Fundamentals (9 Part Series) Just like any distributed system, the nodes must keep a consensus-based communication with one another and this is referred to as the Gossip protocol.

Is Consul KV encrypted?

The Consul agent supports encrypting all of its network traffic.

What is ACL in Consul?

Consul uses Access Control Lists (ACLs) to secure access to the UI, API, CLI, service communications, and agent communications. When securing your datacenter you should configure the ACLs first.

How does DNS work with consul?

One of the main interfaces to Consul is DNS. Using DNS is a simple way to integrate Consul into an existing infrastructure without any high-touch integration. By default, Consul serves all DNS results with a 0 TTL value. This prevents any caching.

Why is server performance important for consul servers?

Since Consul servers run a consensus protocol to process all write operations and are contacted on nearly all read operations, server performance is critical for overall throughput and health of a Consul cluster. Servers are generally I/O bound for writes because the underlying Raft log store performs a sync to disk every time an entry is appended.

What happens if the cluster IP of the consul DNS service changes?

If the cluster IP of the Consul DNS service changes, then it must be updated in the config map to match the new service IP for this to continue working. This can happen if the service is deleted and recreated, such as in full cluster rebuilds. Note: If using a different zone than .consul, change the stub domain to that zone.

How to track DNS queries that are stale in consul?

A new telemetry counter has also been added at consul.dns.stale_queries to track when agents serve DNS queries that are stale by more than 5 seconds. NOTE: The above example is the default setting. You do not need to set it explicitly.