# Consul by HashiCorp As a codebase grows, a monolithic app often evolves into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). A universal pain point for SOA is service discovery and configuration. In many cases, this leads to organizations building home grown solutions. It is an undisputed fact that distributed systems are hard; building one is error-prone and time-consuming. Most systems cut corners by introducing single points of failure such as a single Redis or RDBMS to maintain cluster state. These solutions may work in the short term, but they are rarely fault tolerant or scalable. Besides these limitations, they require time and resources to build and maintain. Consul provides the core set of features needed by an SOA out of the box. By using Consul, organizations can leverage open source work to reduce the time and effort spent re-inventing the wheel and can focus instead on their business applications. Consul is built on well-cited research and is designed with the constraints of distributed systems in mind. At every step, Consul takes efforts to provide a robust and scalable solution for organizations of any size. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://yushuai-w.gitbook.io/consul/intro/vs/consul-by-hashicorp-9.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.