Bootstrapping a consul cluster is a non-trivial operation mostly because it requires sequencing the startup of the cluster nodes with the starting of the consul agents. You can’t form a cluster until you know the IP addresses of the nodes to pass to the consul agent for registration and cluster formation. So you first need to start the nodes and then distribute the IP addresses to all the nodes that need to be in the cluster. This is where cloud-init-buddy comes in. Cloud-init-buddy provides the glue for the cluster nodes to discover each other and not worry about sequencing startup and setup. Everything happens in the cloud-init script with all the sequencing and discovery automatically handled by the cluster nodes themselves.
The first thing we need to do is create a cloud-init-buddy node. I’m going to use the one provided in the Digital Ocean VM, but you can use whatever cloud provider you feel most comfortable with. The only thing you need is for the VM to support cloud-init. https://goo.gl/e2ztVa #DataIntegration #ML
