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The worst outages will always be those involving core infrastructure.

Consul seems to be more prone to issues than one would hope though. Imo the feature set is not worth the increased complexity and operational burden. There are simpler ways of handling service discovery and configuration without running your own consensus based cluster.

Genuine question: can you explain a couple of these simpler ways please?

Central authorities are typically simpler than gossip and consensus systems. They have failure modes too, of course, but those failure modes are better understood and potentially easier to manage.

Sometimes you can't avoid the need for distributed consensus, but you can box it inside a well defined abstraction like leader election, and then do everything else in a traditional client-server way.

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