Last Updated on July 22, 2025
Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services and across on-prem and multi-cloud environments and runtimes. Consul offers service discovery, service mesh, traffic management, and automated updates to network infrastructure devices. You can use these features individually or together in a single Consul deployment.
Consul provides a control plane that enables you to register, query, and secure services deployed across your network. The control plane is the part of the network infrastructure that maintains a central registry to track services and their respective IP addresses. It is a distributed system that runs on clusters of nodes, such as physical servers, cloud instances, virtual machines, or containers.
Features include:
- Multi-Datacenter – Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can support any number of regions without complex configuration.
- Service Mesh – Consul Service Mesh enables secure service-to-service communication with automatic TLS encryption and identity-based authorization. Applications can use sidecar proxies in a service mesh configuration to establish TLS connections for inbound and outbound connections with Transparent Proxy.
- API Gateway – Consul API Gateway manages access to services within Consul Service Mesh, allow users to define traffic and authorization policies to services deployed within the
- Service Discovery – Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.
- Health Checking – Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.
- Dynamic App Configuration – An HTTP API that allows users to store indexed objects within Consul, for storing configuration parameters and application metadata.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows and includes an optional browser based UI.
Website: github.com/hashicorp/consul
Support:
Developer: HashiCorp, Inc.
License: Business Source License
Consul is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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