Consul and service discovery, how it can help

Consul is a tool I’ve been using the last few months to get a handle on our expanding platform. Consul is a tool built by Hashicorp to help with service discovery and configuration management featuring key/value store, health checks and DNS forwarding. The service as a whole is open source, with other tools plugging into the Consul HTTP API. It’s these other tools that have made Consul worthwhile for us, this post will focus on envconsul and consul-template.

More …

Lambda Deploys With Apex

AWS Lambda has been around for a couple of years, in that time the way in which you create and deploy functions has been streamlined by several tools, Apex is one of them. Apex may have only hit the scene about 8 months ago, but since then, has become one of the leading tools in Lambda automation, keeping pace with AWS releases and features. Here is how we use Apex and Lambda to create a pipeline of services.

More …

How To Elb With Alb

Amazon recently announced its new load balancer, the Application Load Balancer(ALB). This load balancer can replace all elastic load balancers currently in service as well as offering several new features designed for container based architectures. While normal load balancers offer support for EC2 based architectures, container based architectures often require HAProxy or NGINX to function effectively. This is in part due to how applications have been broken up for containers, often using micro services.

More …