Chapter 2: Architecture – How Does It Work?

Now that we've had a managerial-level view of what Consul is and what it can do for us, we're going to take a deeper dive into the architecture of the Consul system and look at how it works. Throughout this chapter, we're going to be building up a Consul cluster on our own in order to better understand what information is distributed within the cluster, who is responsible for it, and how it is shared. The topics covered within this chapter include the following:

• Consul cluster operation – We've already seen in theory how Consul servers operate as the brain of the cluster, and how clients work to monitor the services. Now we'll put that theory into practice.
• Establishing consensus – We're going to take a look into how the Consul servers establish consensus to elect a leader and maintain the service catalog.
• Cluster communication protocols – There's a lot of activity...