Single datacenter over multiple networks

Hi,
So from what I understand looking at the infrastructure, and glossary documentation, each data centre is its own network. Now, I wanted a setup where services on my local machine can have a consul server on a remote server. My current implementation has a local datacentre and then one on AWS.

Now say I did want a single datacentre with consul server being on a machine on a different network. How can I do that? It says that ‘for our purposes multiple availability zones within a single EC2 region would be considered part of a single datacenter’. Is it possible to treat my networks in a similar way? What if I use a VPN?

Hi @M-dev-max846,

Welcome!

Could you explain your use case a bit more? Are you trying to register services on your local machine with the remote DC for testing purposes?

Consul requires a datacenter network that is “…private, low latency, and high bandwidth.” [1] Assuming your VPN connection satisfies these requirements, you should be able to extend your datacenter & run servers across different physical environments.

Consul’s docs do not explicitly define “low latency”, however I found this post on the Consul mailing list which suggests 10ms is probably the upper limit - https://groups.google.com/d/topic/consul-tool/y1bFnMntF7M/discussion. I would recommend testing this in your environment to validate the environment is stable before attempting to operate in production.

[1] Glossary | Consul | HashiCorp Developer