(Aside from the issues with reason #1 for not using consul noted below...)
The author says that Atlas is essentially "required" for bootstrapping. We simply use our cloud provider's "list-instances" command (with a filter) so that we don't rely on any third-party and never contact the internet. This is important to us for security and stability, and has kept our cluster running with over 1k members. We don't want to go down when Atlas or etcd's discovery service goes down.
The author says that Atlas is essentially "required" for bootstrapping. We simply use our cloud provider's "list-instances" command (with a filter) so that we don't rely on any third-party and never contact the internet. This is important to us for security and stability, and has kept our cluster running with over 1k members. We don't want to go down when Atlas or etcd's discovery service goes down.