Service Discovery with NGINX Plus and Consul
Service discovery is a key component of most distributed systems and service-oriented or microservices architectures. Because service instances have dynamically assigned network locations which can change over time due to autoscaling, failures, or upgrades, clients need a sophisticated service discovery mechanism for tracking the current network location of a service instance. This blog post describes how to dynamically add or remove load-balanced servers that are registered with Consul, a popular tool for service discovery. The solution uses NGINX Plus’ on-the-fly reconfiguration API, which eliminates the need to reload NGINX Plus configuration file when changing the set of load-balanced servers. With NGINX Plus Release 8 (R8), changes you make with the API now persist across restarts and configuration reloads. Consul, developed by HashiCorp, is most widely used for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure. It also provides failure detection (health checking), a [ more… ]