@ -20,18 +20,22 @@ and [`disable_update_check`](/docs/agent/options.html#disable_update_check).
## Q: How does Atlas integration work?
Consul makes use of a HashiCorp service called [SCADA](http://scada.hashicorp.com)
(Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition). The SCADA system allows clients to maintain
long-running connections to Atlas. Atlas can in turn provide auto-join facilities for
Consul agents (supervisory control) and an integrated dashboard showing the health of
all connected agents (data acquisition).
Hosted Consul Enterprise in Atlas was officially deprecated on March 7th,
2017.
Standard ACLs can be applied to the SCADA connection, ensuring that Atlas is given only
those privileges that make sense for your deployment.
There are strong alternatives available and they are listed below.
Using the SCADA service is optional. SCADA is only enabled by opt-in.
For users on AWS the [-retry-join-ec2 configuration options](/docs/agent/options.html#_retry_join_ec2_tag_key) allow bootstrapping by automatically discovering AWS instances with a given tag key/value at startup.
See the [Atlas integration guide](/docs/guides/atlas.html) for more details.
For users on GCE the [-retry-join-gce configuration options](/docs/agent/options.html#_retry_join_gce_tag_value) allow bootstrapping by automatically discovering instances on Google Compute Engine by tag value at startup.
For users not on AWS or GCE the native [-join and retry-join functionality](/docs/agent/options.html#_join) can be used.
Other features of Consul Enterprise, such as the UI and Alerts also have suitable open source alternatives.
For replacing the UI, we recommend the [free UI packaged as part of Consul open source](https://www.consul.io/docs/agent/options.html#_ui). A live demo can be access at [https://demo.consul.io/ui/](https://demo.consul.io/ui/).
For replacing alerts, we recommend the [open source Consul alerts daemon](https://github.com/acalephstorage/consul-alerts). This is not maintained or supported by HashiCorp, however there is active development from the community.
## Q: Does Consul rely on UDP Broadcast or Multicast?
@ -101,3 +105,11 @@ connect to a single server and so preparation for this possibility is helpful.
The default ulimits are usually sufficient for Consul, but you should closely
scrutinize your own environment's specific needs and identify the root cause
of any excessive resource utilization before arbitrarily increasing the limits.
## Q: What is the per-key value size limitation for Consul's key/value store?
The limit on a key's value size is 512KB. This is is strictly enforced and an
HTTP 413 status will be returned to any client that attempts to store more
than that limit in a value. It should be noted that the Consul key/value store
is not designed to be used as a general purpose database. See
[Server Performance](/docs/guides/performance.html) for more details.