Service configuration management: Best practice(s)

[bbros-dev]

Answering our own question… (of course this is our own imperfect take):

It appears the way to have Terraform manage Consul services is via the Nomad provider resources.

While that HashiCorp blog post mentions use of the Nomad template stanzas, it is not clear if additional flexibility might come from using Consul-Template - care would need to be taken to ensure this doesn’t cause too much drift from the Terraform state information - so we think best to avoid Consul-Template until the Nomad template stanza can’t do what is needed.

Appreciate any other thoughts.

We hope this assists someone else too.

Users interested in this issue/question might also be interested in this related Nomad topic:

Nomad template vs Consul-Template

As best we can tell the best-practice way to have Terraform manage Consul manage/configured services, is with the Nomad template stanza, and the Terraform Nomad provider resources. If our guess is correct, Consul service configuration files are best deployed and managed in production via a Nomad template. In turn the Nomad job state is managed via Terraform. This lead us to wonder what, if any, are the functional differences between Consul-Template and Nomad template stanzas. We can see from …