Consul

Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure.

• Website: https://www.consul.io
• Tutorials: HashiCorp Learn
• Forum: Discuss

Consul provides several key features:

• Multi-Datacenter - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can support any number of regions without complex configuration.

• Service Mesh - Consul Service Mesh enables secure service-to-service communication with automatic TLS encryption and identity-based authorization. Applications can use sidecar proxies in a service mesh configuration to establish TLS connections for inbound and outbound connections with Transparent Proxy.

• API Gateway - Consul API Gateway manages access to services within Consul Service Mesh, allow users to define traffic and authorization policies to services deployed within the mesh.

• Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.

• Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.

• Dynamic App Configuration - An HTTP API that allows users to store indexed objects within Consul, for storing configuration parameters and application metadata.

Consul runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows and includes an optional browser based UI. A commercial version called Consul Enterprise is also available.

Please note: We take Consul's security and our users' trust very seriously. If you believe you have found a security issue in Consul, please responsibly disclose by contacting us at security@hashicorp.com.

Quick Start

A few quick start guides are available on the Consul website:

• Standalone binary install: https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/consul/get-started-vms
• Minikube install: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/kubernetes-minikube
• Kind install: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/kubernetes-kind
• Kubernetes install: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/kubernetes-deployment-guide
• Deploy HCP Consul: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/hcp-gs-deploy

Documentation

Full, comprehensive documentation is available on the Consul website: https://consul.io/docs

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing! Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for guidance. For contributions specifically to the browser based UI, please refer to the UI's README.md for guidance.