Case Study: Bloomberg achieves self-service service discovery at scale with HashiCorp Consul

Self-Service Discovery at Scale With Consul at Bloomberg

Bloomberg, a global financial services company with thousands of developers, microservices, servers, and network segments across three primary data centers and 100+ smaller sites, needed a scalable way to provide service discovery across a very large and complex private network. As its internal SaaS offerings grew, Bloomberg wanted a single approach that could work with service meshes and DNS-based discovery while avoiding duplicate, one-off discovery solutions.

Using HashiCorp Consul, Bloomberg built a self-service discovery platform that included ACL-based namespace ownership, API wrappers, a CLI, libraries, tutorials, and even a zero-code “Farms” workflow for registering services. HashiCorp also helped Bloomberg scale monitoring with Consul ESM, support heterogeneous systems like AIX and Solaris, and centralize data through a hierarchical caching layer for better resilience and efficiency. The result was less configuration, improved reliability, and self-service discovery used by thousands of Bloomberg developers every day.

Bloomberg

Mike Boulding

Team Lead