Summary

Congratulations, we've made it through Chapter 1! I hope it was as fun for you reading it, as it was for me writing it! To review, we started learning about the overall Consul architecture, and how the servers and clients work together to create a dynamic and intelligent system. Like real life, those clients are really the workhorses of the system, monitoring the services, and feeding the data to the servers. That data collected by the distributed clients is fed back to the Consul server cluster and made available for a variety of consumers. The need for dynamic discovery has become critical as we've moved to the cloud and automation. With the awareness of our services, we are able to ensure the validation of transmitters and receivers, and encrypt the information communicated among our components. All of this is possible without changing our applications! Of course, it would be a shame to keep all of that useful network information to ourselves, and we were able to see how Consul shares that information among various devices to simplify our lives and accelerate the overall application deployment flow.

I hope this first chapter was a great start to your Consul journey, and I thank you for putting up with my jokes. Of course, there are more to come! As we dig a little deeper in Chapter 2, Architecture – How Does It Work?, we're going to learn more details about how these servers and clients actually communicate. And if you like, we're going to build our first cluster!