Can someone describe what is Consul and why would anyone need this library on top of it? What problems is it solving (in comparison with WCF or plain WebAPI?).
As you can see it does service discovery, health checking and configuration management. As I understand it, this is useful to automate if you run lots of small web services on AWS, azure, your own data-centre or elsewhere in "the cloud" and so have to configure lots of transient machines, find each other, have them register with load-balancers or get taken down if they fail, etc.
You'd need a library in on top of consul in this case since the makers, hashicorp don't work in .Net, and there will be a gap connecting it to existing .Net web frameworks such as WebApi and NancyFx.
So it's not solving the same problem as WebAPI at all, it's there to help you manage WebApi at scale. Extra need if you can claim the buzzword "microservices".
How well does consul work, and what does it give you that AWS or Azure does not? When exactly would you benefit from it? I'd like to know, actually.
Works great. We have several services (rails and Python) that use consul in AWS for service discovery and as a shared key/value store for some types of configuration.
You could do the service discovery part with tags, and use S3 or dynamo db for the config part instead of using consul.
Since we develop locally on a small collection of VMs we prefer consul instead (no aws tags on our local vagrant VMs!).
