Consul

Consul is a service networking tool from HashiCorp. It helps teams find their services and connect them securely across data centers, clouds and mixed environments.

Consul keeps a live catalog of the services in your network and where each one runs. Applications can look each other up by name instead of relying on fixed addresses. Consul can also run a service mesh, which encrypts traffic between services and controls which services are allowed to talk to each other.

• Look up services by name through a shared catalog
• Run a service mesh with sidecar proxies
• Set rules for which services may connect
• Encrypt traffic between services
• Manage traffic routing at the application layer

Platform and operations teams that run many services across several environments. It also suits teams moving from a single large application to smaller services, since the project publishes a guide for that kind of migration.

Consul is offered as an Enterprise edition and a Community edition, and it can be installed on virtual machines or on Kubernetes. Setup takes planning, mainly around the server cluster and security settings, so it fits best with teams that already know their networking. The HashiCorp developer site includes tutorials and a sandbox where you can try it before you deploy anything.