Tutorial
Manage traffic with Consul service mesh
View the service mesh topology diagram for two example services. Then use Consul intentions to control communication between the services.
Use case
Manage traffic with Consul
Consul offers the ability to manage L4/L7 traffic based on service identity and implement progressive delivery practices like canary deployments or A/B testing.
Challenge
Customizing traffic between services
There are many scenarios where developers would want to customize traffic flow between services. For example, developers want to deploy new versions of a service in a controlled manner without causing downtime. Bluntly taking old versions down and deploying new versions leads to downtime and can risk exposure to extended outages if unexpected problems emerge.
Solution
Centralize traffic shaping with Consul
Consul solves for these use cases including canary testing, A/B tests, blue/green deployment, and soft multi-tenancy (prod/qa/staging sharing compute resources). Developers can shape traffic between services in a methodical manner when introducing a new version of their service. They can gradually direct traffic to the new version and increase the traffic percentage over time, thereby reducing the risks associated with application updates.
Tutorials
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Tutorial
Traffic splitting for service deployments
In this tutorial you will deploy a new version of a service and shift HTTP traffic slowly to the new version.
Tutorial
Load balancing services in Consul service mesh with Envoy
Deploy and configure Consul, Prometheus, and Grafana. Deploy a multi-tier demo application and observe traffic in Grafana.
Docs
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Documentation
L7 traffic management
Layer 7 traffic management allows operators to divide L7 traffic between different subsets of service instances when using Connect.
Documentation
Discovery chain
Learn about the discovery chain model used to configure and control how proxy upstreams are resolved to specific instances.
Documentation
Network infrastructure automation
Network infrastructure automation (NIA) enables dynamic updates to network infrastructure devices triggered by service changes.
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.