extend host:port to support multiple agents

[matthiasschoger]

extend host:port to support multiple agents

[silas]

Looking at the Go API client it seems like they're against this:

• hashicorp/consul#1232
• https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/how-to-make-a-client-for-multiple-hosts/29617

If they end up adding this to the Go client I'd consider replicating the functionality here, but I think it's better to just follow their lead around how API clients should work.

It seems like you're best bet is to 1) put consul behind a load balancer or 2) handle the failover logic in your application.

[matthiasschoger]

Sorry, I probably didn’t make myself clear.

I was proposing for your client to have one connection to one Consul instance from the list.
Only if that instance goes down or is unavailable, the client should select another Consul instance from the list.

In every case, only one connection exists at the same time from the client to a Consul instance.

[silas]

Yeah, that's what I understood you to mean.

What "down or ... unavailable" means is pretty complicated, and the experience is going to be bad in all but the most trivial cases (e.g. DNS doesn't resolve, DNS times out, HTTP port not open, HTTP times out, TLS certificate invalid, Consul no longer a member of the cluster, etc...).

If you have a definition of what down or unavailable means to you it should be pretty easy to create a wrapper for the client to handle those cases. If you don't want to do that setting up a load balancer is probably going to be the most reliable solution.

[matthiasschoger]

Just read the comment on the Consul thread in detail, and I think I understand better now.

Seems like the recommendation is to connect the the local Consul agent by default. Makes sense and should cover my use-case.
Closing this issue.