How are service instances counted in HCP Consul?
A service is a logical representation of an application or microservice that is registered in Consul. Service instances refers to one or more running versions of a given service, each tracked as a distinct provider of the service by Consul’s service registry. Multiple instances of a service are typically created to address scale and/or redundancy requirements from organizations. In Kubernetes, service instances are counted via the total amount of pods over all existing Consul services and any replicas of them. For example, if you have deployed 2 services (i.e. having 2 Kubernetes deployments) in a Kubernetes cluster - Service A and Service B, and Service A is running with 3 replicas (pods), while service B is running with 2 replicas (pods). The total Service instances in this scenario is 5.
Additional Information
Please see our documentation for more detailed information on HCP Consul Pricing
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