Add Consul support

[wkornewald]

Consul comes with health checks, multi-datacenter support and other very nice features. Many people prefer it over etcd, so it would be great if fleet had Consul support.

[bcwaldon]

I'm totally for supporting alternate backends, but unfortunately this involves a nontrivial amount of work. Not only is fleet unprepared for a drop-in etcd replacement, but once it is, there exists the cost to keep supporting said replacement. Given that this is the first time this ticket has been raised, I would like to wait and see if there is a legitimate need for this, or if it is just a "nice to have". Once we've properly vetted the need for this, we can then discuss the path forward. For now, there are no plans to support consul in the immediate future.

[jonboulle]

To add a little more colour: fleet currently relies heavily on the use of TTLs, which do not yet exist in consul.

[JeanMertz]

Given that this is the first time this ticket has been raised, I would like to wait and see if there is a legitimate need for this, or if it is just a "nice to have".

Just putting down my vote for this. For now, I am running Consul right beside etcd.

[0xgeert]

Same here. Relying on Consul on top of Etcd.

[justinclayton]

@jonboulle Can you elaborate a bit more? I know consul does support TTL-based checks, but that may not be what you're referring to.

http://www.consul.io/docs/agent/checks.html

[jonboulle]

@justinclayton No, I was talking about per-key TTLs - see here

[justinclayton]

@jonboulle got it...so perhaps this could be revisited once hashicorp/consul#172 is resolved.

[josh-padnick]

It looks like hashicorp/consul#172 is now resolved.

[jonboulle]

Waldon and I have limited capacity to work on fleet at the moment so it's very unlikely we can prioritise the considerable amount of work this would involve, but if someone is willing to come up with a patch set we would definitely review it.

[mainframe]

+1 for fleet with consul backend

[MrJoy]

+1 as well.

[kunthar]

+1 and we will check the code soon. 2 months timeframe.

[codebudo]

+1
Can this be simulated with a sidecar and the Consul http /kv api as a PoC?

[hookenz]

+1. having to use both two KV back-ends seems quite unnecessary. I prefer consul over etcd.

[pmoust]

big 👍 on this.

[atomi]

Supporting Consul is a good way to get folks turned on to Core OS. 👍

[gmr]

+1 here -- I'm using Consul next to fleet.

[xied75]

👍

So the consul binary would be built into CoreOS image and we can start it in cloud-config.yaml? How do we specify how many server and clients we want?

[ilijaljubicic]

+1

[nicolaballotta]

+1

[scrothers]

+1

[alwinmark]

+1

[ThatsNinja]

+1

[MrJoy]

Any plans to revisit this given that there's fairly clearly interest, and Consul now has per-key TTLs?

[scrothers]

@MrJoy I think part of the problem is that the ticket is closed. If anyone knows anybody from the Fleet team, perhaps they get it re-opened, even if only to re-close it again.

[crawford]

We are open to patches but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us to invest in features like this right now. We've narrowed our focus to (mainly) bug fixes at this point. Once we have some free cycles, we can reinvestigate this.

[OferE]

+1 - why do you enforce the use of etcd?
I already have consul up and running and i don't need the etcd cluster.

[jonboulle]

As crawford mentioned, we just have no plans in our own roadmap to add support, but we'd be very receptive to clean patchsets to add it.

[kunthar]

it is your very own case and your decision not to use etcd.
i have no direct relation with coreos and i want to use in combination with
my very own case. hope i am free to do this?
On Mar 10, 2016 3:28 PM, "OferE" notifications@github.com wrote:

+1 - why do you enforce the use of etcd?
I? already have consul up and running and i don't need the etcd cluster.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1004 (comment).

[celevra]

+1

[siddharthlatest]

+1

[ghost]

+1

[jhmartin]

+1