Consul Service Discovery with Docker (opens in new tab)

It's the recommended way to stand up a Consul cluster without a risk of causing split brain if it turns out multiple nodes are coming up at the exact same time, and it achieves that without an external / pre-existing coordination service.

In comparison, etcd's recommended way to bootstrap a cluster is to use CoreOS' "discovery" service, which is great, but does constitute one extra dependency.

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Now, the downside of Consul is that it seems etcd has much more momentum.

  [0]: http://www.consul.io/docs/guides/bootstrapping.html

Another mature option for service discovery that this port doesn't mention is AirBnB's SmartStack: https://github.com/airbnb/synapse and https://github.com/airbnb/nerve. Here's a talk from DockerCon about using SmartStack and Docker: http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/dockercon-video-building-a-sm...