HashiCorp Consul 1.6 General Availability

We're really excited to announce the general availability of Consul 1.6.0. Consul is a multi-cloud service networking platform to connect and secure services across any runtime platform and public or private cloud.

This release is focused on several major new features for Consul Connect, Consul's service mesh solution and a number of improvements and bug fixes. To read more about the release, read the beta announcement post.

» New Features

• L7 Traffic Management. There are now new configuration entry types that enable advanced traffic management patterns for service-to-service requests. The additional configuration entry kinds, service-resolver, service-splitter, and service-router, enable increased reliability with advanced service failover, and deployment patterns such as HTTP path-based routing, and traffic shifting. Read more here.
• Mesh Gateways. Mesh gateways are Envoy proxies at the edge of a network, which enable services in separate networking environments to easily communicate with each other. They are configured by Consul using a similar mechanism as sidecar proxies. Read more here.
• Intention & CA Replication. These features make connecting services across logical datacenters in Consul possible, and are vital building blocks for mesh gateways. Note this feature was previously part of Consul Enterprise.

» Pre-Release Period

Thank you to the community for providing feedback on the beta and release candidate versions of Consul 1.6. A large number of improvements were made to the new and existing Connect features based on the feedback given. The full list of changes can be viewed in the v1.6.0 changelog.

Please also note that managed proxies, deprecated in version 1.3.0, were fully removed in this release.

» Conclusion

Please review the v1.6.0 changelog for a detailed list of changes. The release binaries can be downloaded here. To watch a live demo of Consul 1.6 new features, register for the webinar here.

Thank you to our active community members who have been invaluable in adding new features, reporting bugs, and improving the documentation for Consul in this release!