So far, everything that we have been doing with the configuration was connected to the local set of data. In a real large-scale enterprise environment, this is not always the case and quite frequently, there is a desire to be able to make the configuration changes at large—across hundreds or even thousands of instances or machines.

There are a number of tools that exist to help you with this task, and in this recipe, we will take a look at one that—in my opinion—stands out from the group, giving you the ability to cleanly and elegantly configure the environment variables for a starting application using a distributed data store. The tool's name is Consul. It is an open source product from Hashicorp and is designed to discover and configure the services in a large, distributed infrastructure.

In this recipe, we will take a look at how to install and do the basic configuration of Consul, and experiment with some key functionalities that it provides. This will give us the necessary...