https://consul.io/ is mentioned as an "exciting" technology. What is a "boring" alternative for this... that is, a multi-datacenter, service discovery/health-check/config-distribution software that'll "just work" ?
You can try using DNS with dynamic zones as a simple service discovery mechanism (sharing one master with all your environments), but you'll soon find out that:
- healthchecking really is a good idea in service discovery
- clients are awful about refreshing state from DNS
- single-master systems are a bad idea in a large environment.
- DNS replication is finicky; DNS caching is slow.
Puppet with puppetdb can sorta fill this gap, too, as long as you don't need fast convergence (or fast puppet runs, if your puppetdb is more than a few milliseconds away from any of your nodes).
Consul may be new, but it's built on really solid ideas and technologies. You can read papers[1][2] about the underlying technologies to get a sense for how Consul will fail. I'd like to think that counteracts some of the problems you get with newness.
