Everybody Talks: Understanding the Key Algorithms Behind Consul

Sarah Christoff used to work as a systems engineer at a consulting firm where she would hard code IP addresses everywhere—even though they were on cloud infrastructure. This caused a lot of difficulties. She didn't know how to solve the problem at the time, but at one point, Armon Dadgar, the co-founder of HashiCorp probably had that same problem.

His solution was a handful of peer-reviewed algorithms with roots going back many decades that were coded together to help build HashiCorp's Consul service discovery and service mesh tool.

In this talk, Sarah Christoff, a software engineer on Consul, will explain—in very simple examples—many of the core pieces that make Consul so resilient and manageable when managing distributed service communication.

These algorithms include:

• SWIM
• Gossip
• memberlist
• Serf
• Lifeguard
• Raft

See the full transcript from this talk at HashiConf EU here.