Use cases

Organizations adopting Kubernetes want to observe, secure, and automate the connections between pods and clusters. Consul on Kubernetes provides a scalable and highly resilient platform for microservices. Consul supports any Kubernetes runtime including hosted solutions like EKS, AKS, GKE, and OpenShift.

Consul acts as a centralized registry that discovers, tracks, and monitors your services regardless of the underlying runtimes, platform, or infrastructure. Consul can be your single source of truth for cataloging and maintaining a record of all your services across multiple disparate teams.

A core component of HashiCorp’s zero trust security solution, Consul uses identity-based access to automatically deny service-to-service communication unless authorized explicitly on an as-needed basis. All authorized communication within the service mesh is mutually authenticated with TLS certificates and encrypted in transit.

Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) uses Terraform to automate networking tasks and workflows based on changes observed by the Consul catalog. CTS reduces reliance on ticketing systems and manual tasks like updating firewall rules or load balancer configurations that are error prone.

Consul lets you manage L4/L7 traffic using service identity and implement progressive delivery practices like canary deployments or A/B testing. This helps teams improve application resiliency by applying service failover policies between availability zones, regions, or private and public clouds.