Author: Zen and the Art of Computer Programming
1 Introduction
Spring Cloud Consul is a service registration and discovery toolkit based on the Netflix OSS project Consul. Spring Cloud Consul itself does not provide any service governance functions, but it provides some components that encapsulate the Consul API to help developers use Consul to implement service registration and discovery more conveniently. In service governance, the service discovery component is responsible for obtaining the list of available services from Consul and providing them to microservice clients. In addition, the service registration component can register services with Consul so that other services can find the service. Since Spring Cloud Consul provides easy-to-use components, there is generally no need to write complex code to integrate Consul.
Spring Cloud Consul was first proposed by the Pivotal team and was born to solve the service registration and discovery problems of distributed systems. Although Spring Cloud Consul is built based on the Netflix OSS project Consul, it is not limited to Consul and is also compatible with other service registration centers such as Zookeeper. Therefore, compared with the traditional service discovery method based on third-party clients, Spring Cloud Consul can bring the following advantages:
- Simple development and smooth learning curve: no need to introduce various dependencies or configurations, just add the corresponding Starter dependencies to start using it;
- Flexible configuration: Using standardized configuration files, you can freely choose which features to support, such as security authentication, load balancing, etc.;
- Rich features: Consul has rich features, such as service health check, Key/Value storage, multi-data center cluster, service grouping, etc.;
- Supports multiple languages: Spring Cloud Consul already supports Java, Python, Golang, Ruby and other languages, and also has client support contributed by the community;
- With Spring B