Consul Service Mesh

Consul is an open-source service networking platform created by HashiCorp, founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in 2014, providing service discovery, service mesh, configuration management, and health checking for distributed, microservices-based applications, enabling services to register themselves and discover other services through a distributed key-value store and DNS interface, with the service mesh capabilities providing secure service-to-service communication through mutual TLS encryption, traffic management through proxy configuration, and observability through distributed tracing, adopted by over ten thousand organizations including Barclays, SAP, Deutsche Bank, and Mercedes-Benz for managing cloud-native infrastructure. The service discovery enables services to automatically register their network addresses and metadata through the Consul agent running on each compute node, with the agents performing health checks against registered services and reporting status to the Consul servers, enabling consumers to discover healthy service instances through the HTTP API, DNS interface, or prepared queries that support automatic failover to alternate data centers. The service mesh uses the Connect feature to establish encrypted service-to-service communication through sidecar proxies or native integrations, with automatic certificate rotation through the built-in certificate authority, intention-based access control defining which services can communicate with which, and traffic splitting for canary deployments and blue-green deployments through the Envoy proxy integration. The key-value store provides hierarchical key-value storage for application configuration with watch triggers that notify services when configuration changes. The multi-datacenter federation. The Consul Template for dynamic configuration generation. The monitoring through health checks. Designed by HashiCorp. Designed for DevOps teams.