Hi everyone 👋

Happy Friday!

As part of the shift from Consul we have had to rebuild the service management layer in Stargate in order to handle service metadata, something required to determine which services are hosting apps in order to define DNS routing correctly across the network.

This means that on top of the KV changes discussed in earlier updates, we now have:

• Service registration (RPC)
• Service deregistration (RPC)
• Service health (RPC)
• Service metadata (RPC)

This is a significant move in the entire consul migration work stream. It should be ready to move out of test.network to the mainnet at the end of this month.

As part of this work we've also built in more intelligence to the network services layer, for example Stargates reporting on the Gateways connected to them directly:

Arthur spoke about the why of moving on from Consul in yesterday's AMA:

"Network coordination and configuration sharing was and still is one of the key components to Edge. At the very beginning there was an immediate requirement to implement a solution that would last us long enough to work out exactly what we needed from it.

"We introduced Consul early (not long after ditching ZooKeeper, but that’s a story for another time). As development progressed, it became clearer that what we needed from a decentralised network manifest was not always going to be covered by Consul, but introducing it was a level of technical debt we could, on balance, afford.

"Predictably, it became sluggish when trying to handle the increased number of healthchecks as more devices connected. Unpredicabtably, it also didn’t cope with regular KV writes, so as more users onboarded with CDN we saw a rapid slowdown of deployment. When I say rapid, I mean it took something like 30 seconds to deploy a new instance of CDN, which might seem pretty fast for global deployment, but we could see it wouldn’t scale.

"Over the last 12 months we've raised a number of issues relating to performance without adequate feedback. We've also seen a rather quick shift to monetisation methods that we don't necessarily agree with, including the removal of features for non-enterprise users. To be an enterprise user we would need to host via Hashicorp owned infrastructure, which means it is no longer decentralised within our network.