Spinning up a microservice discovery client

In a microservices architecture where multiple services are deployed, the service discovery client helps the application to find out the services they are dependent on, which can be either through DNS or HTTP. When we talk about service discovery clients one of the most common and famous is Consul by HashiCorp, which we will be spinning up in this recipe.

Getting ready…

Verify whether Consul is installed by executing the following command:

$ consul version
Consul v0.8.5
 Protocol 2 spoken by default, understands 2 to 3 (agent will automatically use protocol >2 when speaking to compatible agents)

How to do it…

Start consul agent in server mode by executing the following command:

$ consul agent -dev

How it works…

Once the command has executed successfully the Consul agent starts running in server mode, giving us the following output:

We can also list the members of the Consul cluster by executing the following command:

$ consul members

This will give us...