Service Discovery Modernization with Consul

Challenge

AWS deprecated App Mesh, yet TIDAL’s fleet still spanned ECS workloads and latency-sensitive EC2 services. A forced migration timeline would have risked mission-critical streaming flows, regional launches, and modernisation milestones.

My Role

I owned the technical strategy and execution for discovery modernisation, chairing the RFC process, securing security review sign-off, and coordinating the rollout plan across playback, catalog, and monetisation services. I also mentored engineers who built the Terraform modules and validated the migration playbooks.

Approach

• Evaluated open-source options and led RFCs that compared multi-cloud readiness, operational burden, and security posture.
• Selected Consul for its first-class ECS and EC2 support, then designed the control-plane topology plus failover strategy.
• Built Terraform modules and Ansible playbooks so product teams could self-serve registration, mesh policies, and certificate rotation.
• Integrated Consul health checks with our IDP so ownership, runbooks, and alert routing stayed consistent with SRE processes.

Impact

• Platform teams can retire EC2 workloads on their schedule without blocking new ECS features.
• mTLS policies between services now ship as defaults, raising the security baseline across the estate.
• Discovery data powers auto-generated topology views, giving engineers a clearer understanding of blast radius before deploying changes.

Technologies & Tools