HashiCorp

In this episode we talk to Mitchell Hashimoto, founder and co-CTO of HashiCorp and Paul Banks, software engineer on the Consul team.

We get a little insight into the personalities and backgrounds of both guests, most importantly we learn some amazing things about the new feature in Consul called Connect.  Why we need a Service Mesh and how it helps with security for dynamically scheduled and legacy applications.

https://www.consul.io

Episode 6 - Consul Connect With Mitchell Hashimoto And Paul Banks

In June of this year, Consul 1.2 was released. The release expanded Consul’s capability around service segmentation (controlling who and how services connect East and West). On this week’s podcast, Wes and Mitchell discuss Consul in detail. The two discuss Consul’s design decisions around focusing on user space networking, layer 4 routing, Go, Windows’ performance characteristics, the roadmap for eBPF on Linux, and an interesting feature that Consul implements called Network Tomography. The show wraps with Mitchell’s discussion on some of the research that Hashicorp is doing around machine learning and security with Consul.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Consul is first and foremost a centralized service registry that provides discovery. While it has a key-value store, it is Consul’s least important feature.
With the June release (1.2), Consul entered more into the space of a service mesh with the focus on service segmentation (controlling how you connect and who can connect).
- Hashicorp attempts to limit the language fragmentation in the Company and has seen a lot of success leveraging Go across their platforms. Therefore, Consul is written in Go.
- Because Consul focused on layer 4 first, it is recommended to leverage the recent integration with Envoy for achieving high degrees of observability.
- All of the network routing with Consul happens in user space at this point; however, kernel space routing with eBPF is planned for the near term. The focus, at this point, is safely cross-compiling to every platform and addressing the most possible use cases. The focuses isn’t on the high performance use cases (yet).
- For any two servers across the globe in different data centers, instantly Consul can give you 99th percentile round-trip time between with uses a feature called Network Tomography.

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Show Notes

Mitchell Hashimoto on Consul since 1.2 and its Role as a Modern Service Mesh

For those who may not be aware, Mitchell Hashimoto is a Co-founder and CTO at HashiCorp where he directs the company’s vision, values, product design, and culture. Mitchell and his team have created several popular open source tools that have helped engineering teams automate their deployment process. He is best known for Vagrant, Consul, Packer, and Vault. Hashimoto majored in Computer Science at the University of Washington and is a recent newlywed. 

During his time at UW, he started his first popular open source project: Vagrant, that led him to cofound HashiCorp with his partner, Armon Dadgar. Mitchell and Armon are committed to delivering software tools to support next-generation technologies that will empower companies worldwide to re-engineer their workflows.

HashiCorp

Chuck Vieni