Service Discovery in Docker Using NGINX and NGINX Plus with Consul

In a microservices application, the set of running service instances change dynamically and their assigned network locations keep changing as well. Consequently, in order to load balance requests across the most recent set of service instances, a load balancer like NGINX must use a service-discovery mechanism.

In this session from nginx.conf 2016, Kunal Pariani, Pre-Sales Engineer at NGINX, demonstrates how NGINX and NGINX Plus can load balance HTTP traffic in a Docker-based environment to an arbitrary number of backend servers that are registered with Consul, a popular open source service discovery tool. With open source NGINX, you can use tools like Consul Template, which listens for changes to the service catalog in Consul and then reconfigures and reloads NGINX automatically.

NGINX, Inc.'s commercial offering, NGINX Plus, further improves service discovery integration by enabling you to dynamically add or remove servers in a load-balanced group as they are discovered via Consul, using either NGINX Plus' HTTP-based API or by re-resolving DNS records through Consul's DNS interface. This also eliminates the need to reload the NGINX Plus configuration every time there is a change the set of load-balanced servers.

Read more on this topic on the NGINX blog, https://www.nginx.com/blog/service-di...