i am constantly impressed at the hashicorp guys, who continue to release great tools. they actually released serf on the same day as we released nerve and synapse, which comprise airbnb's service registration and discovery platform, smartstack. see https://github.com/airbnb/nerve and https://github.com/airbnb/synapse
that said, as i wrote my blog post on service discovery ( http://nerds.airbnb.com/smartstack-service-discovery-cloud/ ),
dns does not make for the greatest interface to service discovery because many apps and libraries cache DNS looksups.
an http interface might be safer, but then you have to build a connector for this into every one of your apps.
i still feel that smartstack is a better approach because it is transparent. haproxy also provides us with great introspection for what's happening in the infrastructure -- who is talking to whom. we can analyse this both in our logs via logstash and in real-time using datadog's haproxy monitoring integration, and it's been invaluable.
however, this definitely deserves a look if you're interested in, for instance, load-balancing UDP traffic
I think that Synapse already provides a plugin architecture. I t should be trivial to use the Consul HTTP API as a Synapse plugin. All this does is bridge the information Consul has and setup an HAProxy instance locally. If you want to go that route, should be pretty simple!
that said, as i wrote my blog post on service discovery ( http://nerds.airbnb.com/smartstack-service-discovery-cloud/ ), dns does not make for the greatest interface to service discovery because many apps and libraries cache DNS looksups.
an http interface might be safer, but then you have to build a connector for this into every one of your apps.
i still feel that smartstack is a better approach because it is transparent. haproxy also provides us with great introspection for what's happening in the infrastructure -- who is talking to whom. we can analyse this both in our logs via logstash and in real-time using datadog's haproxy monitoring integration, and it's been invaluable.
however, this definitely deserves a look if you're interested in, for instance, load-balancing UDP traffic