Has anyone tried CoreOS with Consul instead of etcd?

namecast · on May 10, 2014

I'm not sure that could work, at least at the moment. Right now etcd ties into fleet very tightly.

If you stopped etcd on all your CoreOS nodes, installed consul, and had all of your CoreOS systemd units register with consul (say, with an ExecStartPre step), you'd technically be 'running CoreOS with Consul' - but fleet would be just straight up broken without etcd, meaning there'd be no way to submit units to different nodes in your cluster, or view logs, or really manage the cluster at all.

Looking at the fleet source code (https://github.com/coreos/fleet), it looks like swapping out etcd for consul would take a lot more effort than 'sed -i -e 's/etcd/consul/g' *.go'. You'd essentially have to do a rewrite of fleet from scratch.

carlivar · on May 19, 2014

I don't think they should be mutually exclusive. etcd is too baked-in to CoreOS. My plan is to try out Consul in containers rather than in CoreOS itself.