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You're reading from  Simplifying Service Management with Consul

Product typeBook
Published inNov 2021
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781800202627
Edition1st Edition
Concepts
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Robert E. Jackson
Robert E. Jackson
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Robert E. Jackson

Robert E. Jackson earned his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1997, and since then has found himself in a multitude of pre- and post-sales positions with various successful start-ups, mostly in the network access technology space. He has played multiple roles over the course of his career, including sales engineer, solutions engineer, integration engineer, network engineer, and product manager. Throughout all of these engineering positions he never learned to drive a train, but he was able to experience the digital transformation from traditional data centers to cloud computing from multiple viewpoints. He is currently employed at HashiCorp as a senior solutions engineer, based in the northeast area of the United States.
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Rafting consensus

We've seen how the Consul servers elect their leader utilizing the consensus protocol, but what exactly does that mean, and is that all that they do? Well, of course they do more; otherwise, this would be a very short section. The consensus protocol that Consul utilizes is based on the Raft algorithm (https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf), which is based on Paxos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29). If you get the feeling that we are quickly heading down a rabbit hole, don't worry—we aren't going to keep digging until we hit water.

A closer look at leader election

As you will soon see, a Consul server is configured with a number of other servers, which it will Raft up with. This is called the bootstrap_expect value within the configuration. That number of servers is important to remember, as it will come up again. Of course, if a Consul server is going to expect a number of servers to Raft up with, it needs to know about...

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Simplifying Service Management with Consul
Published in: Nov 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781800202627

Author (1)

author image
Robert E. Jackson

Robert E. Jackson earned his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1997, and since then has found himself in a multitude of pre- and post-sales positions with various successful start-ups, mostly in the network access technology space. He has played multiple roles over the course of his career, including sales engineer, solutions engineer, integration engineer, network engineer, and product manager. Throughout all of these engineering positions he never learned to drive a train, but he was able to experience the digital transformation from traditional data centers to cloud computing from multiple viewpoints. He is currently employed at HashiCorp as a senior solutions engineer, based in the northeast area of the United States.
Read more about Robert E. Jackson