Discover services with DNS or HTTP
Use DNS or an HTTP API to discover registered services and their locations with Consul.
Identity-based networking with Consul
Consul uses service identities and traditional networking practices to help organizations securely connect applications running in any environment.
The pillars of service networking
A modern service networking solution requires that we answer four specific questions: Where are my services running? How do I secure the communication between them? How do I automate routine networking tasks? How do I control access to my environments?
Discover services
Create a central registry that tracks services, updates, and health statuses in real time.
Secure networking
Ensure all service-to-service communication is authenticated, authorized, and encrypted.
Automate networking
Reduce the operator burden by automating key networking tasks.
Access services
Control access to services at the point of entry and centralize traffic management.
Introduction to HashiCorp Consul
HashiCorp Co-Founder and CTO Armon Dadgar gives a whiteboard overview of HashiCorp Consul, a service networking solution to connect, configure, and secure services in dynamic infrastructure.
Common use cases for Consul
Control access to services
Control access to services running within a Consul service mesh with the API Gateway.
Dynamic load balancing
Automate manual networking tasks and reduce ticket queues as a bonus.
Automated networking tasks
Provision apps faster. Automate complex networking tasks. Separate concerns so operators can easily manage and optimize networking.
mTLS encryption
Authenticate with mTLS and encrypt connections between services.
Multi-platform service mesh
Consul service mesh can deploy in any environment and supports multiple runtimes, including Kubernetes, Nomad, and VMs.
Observability
Visualize service mesh topology with Consul’s built-in UI or one of the included APM integrations.
L7 traffic management
Implement fine-grained traffic policies for routing and splitting traffic across services.
Better together: Consul and the HashiCorp stack
4 tutorials
Automated infrastructure with Terraform
Speed up time to delivery for services with network infrastructure automation. Automated configuration changes with Consul-Terraform-Sync.
3 tutorials
Defense in depth with Vault
Ensure complete security for service-to-service access, authorization, and communication by using Consul and Vault.
5 tutorials
Application delivery with Nomad
Accelerate the application delivery lifecycle with orchestration and scheduling from Nomad and Consul service mesh.
Consul in practice
How and why users deploy Consul
Tutorial
Service discovery
Discover and track applications within any environment. Make new services instantly available and avoid outages caused by stale catalogs.
Tutorial
Network infrastructure automation with Consul-Terraform-Sync
Automate key networking tasks, like updating load balancer member pools or applying firewall policies, using Consul and Terraform.
Tutorial
Health checks
Know in real time if services are reachable and healthy. Identify any potential outages before they happen.
Tutorial
Secure connections with mTLS
Ensure that all communication between services is both authorized and encrypted automatically.
Tutorial
Traffic splitting
Use Consul service mesh to view the flow of requests between services. Implement progressive delivery practices, like canary deployments.
Tutorial
Observability
Monitor application performance and identify problem areas at the service level. Gather metrics that can be monitored in the Consul UI.
Consul case studies
An inside look at powerful solutions from some of the world’s most innovative companies.
Get HashiCorp Certified
Level up your skills with HashiCorp Consul with a networking automation certification for site reliability engineers, networking admins, solutions architects, DevOps professionals, and cloud engineers.
Next steps
HCP Consul simplifies cloud networking automation on either self-managed or fully managed infrastructure. Get started for free and pay only for what you use.