So far, everything that we have been doing with the configuration was connected to the local set of data. In a real, large-scale enterprise environment, this is not always the case and quite frequently there is the desire to be able to make the configuration changes at large, across hundreds or even thousands of instances or machines.

There are a number of tools that exist to help you with this task, and in this recipe, we will take a look at one that, in my opinion, stands out from the group, giving you the ability to cleanly and elegantly configure the environment variables for a starting application using a distributed data store. The tool's name is Consul. It is an open source product from Hashicorp and is designed to discover and configure the services in a large, distributed infrastructure.

In this recipe, we will take a look at how to install and configure Consul and experiment with some key functionalities that it provides. This will give us the necessary familiarity for our next recipe, where we will be using Consul to provide the configuration values that are needed to start our application.