Just playing with Consul.
`choco install -y consul`
`choco install -y curl`
`choco install -y jq`
`choco install -y sed`
To start the server:
`bin\start.cmd`
And from there you can set two to follow one:
1. Go to http://localhost:8500/ui/local_machine/kv/notepad/two/
2. Create a key called `follow`
3. Set its value to `one`
Tell one to start:
1. Go to http://localhost:8500/ui/local_machine/kv/notepad/one/state
2. Create a key called `desired`
3. Set the value to `running`
Then notepad instance one will figure out to start.
Once instance one is up, two will discover that it's changed and two will also start.
Set one to stopped to have it eventually stop and two eventually follow.
It works well with the TICK monitoring suite and the ELK log aggregator, both OSS easy and free at the low end and as complex and possibly expensive as you like on the high end. As an example, there's a plugin for Telegraf, the T in TICK. And there are plugins for dashboards like Graphana.