Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Consul 0.2 UI Demo (consul.io)
86 points by geetarista on May 1, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



This is exactly what I was waiting to see, great front-end, linked to a well thought-out and well-documented back end. Great work guys

To elaborate a little more on what I think makes the front end "great": I think it's very simple. I contemplated making something like this simply because I think tools like nagios,etc are swiss army knives, BUT they look really ugly. I don't see why we can't have some beauty in monitoring.

I think that beauty, and function actually come together well in the interface as it stands now (I know it's not complete) -- I immediately understood where to look, what to click. While the everyday-user is not going to be unfamiliar with the interface, I also think an experienced user could benefit from having the clarity of a detail view, and individual machine view (the right and left respectively).

One place I can think of that might not be ideal for the kind of design is if you want to know aggregates/historical data of a certain data center/machine -- but I think this could easily be remedied by adding a stats page that is made to show that kind of broad data specifically (or even keep it out of the core codebase, and just have it be a very very popular plugin -- small tools ftw)



After last seeing Consul posted 2 weeks ago, and playing with Docker for deploying my application, it got some gears turning. I think the two would be a great combo. Though I like the philosophy of immutable containers that Docker asserts, where if the topography needs to be reogranized (with linking containers [1]), you can just tear them down and spin them back up in a second. In practice this is kind of a pain, and a very top down view. Using Consul would make it very nice for snapping together infrastructure, with more robustness provided, i.e. health checks & discovery.

As a side note, I played around with Ubuntu's Juju a bit, and they also allow you to change an instance's configuration during runtime. But it's from a top down perspective, than distributed.

[1] http://docs.docker.io/use/working_with_links_names/


I just found out about CoreOS a couple days ago. I don't think it's necessarily what you're talking about, but seems a little similar https://coreos.com/


You'll like Mesos too.


Interesting. I definitely think service discovery and such are going to become a lot more popular in the near future.


Do you mean service discovery as in UDDI? It sounds a bit like it's old SOA ideas all over again - they failed and it would be beneficial to understand why before we make the same mistakes.


Not sure, I've not heard of UDDI before. Mostly I mean, in a really general sense, that servers come up and become part of a cluster or group of systems providing a service.


Do you have links/pointers? I'm familiar with several well-running systems of this type, so I'm just curious.


Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Description_Discovery...

says Microsoft, IBM, et.al. abandoned their efforts of providing public service discovery infrastructure. Doing it the same for REST may just be repeating of old mistakes.


This is super nice, I have been looking for a modern Nagios to monitor a few clusters.


What are the requirements? What OS? What dependencies?


From their Github repo:

> Consul runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is recommended to run the Consul servers only on Linux, however.

https://github.com/hashicorp/consul


I am consulio heh heh


UI isn't responsive to my not really that small laptop screen. I have to horizontally scroll to see everything when there is little to see. There is too much whitespace everywhere.


Given that it's a 0.2 release, changes are probably coming. It's exciting to see what's surfaced through the UI and what we can possibly do!




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: