What is Consul by HashiCorp?
Consul by HashiCorp is an open-source service networking solution that enables service discovery, health checking, segmentation, and configuration across dynamic infrastructure. It provides a full-featured control plane with service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionality built-in.
Key features of Consul include:
- Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. This allows services to easily find and communicate with each other.
- Health Checking - Health checking mechanisms are built-in - services can report their health, which is distributed via gossip to the rest of the Consul cluster. Unhealthy services are automatically filtered out from queries.
- KV Store - A flexible key/value store enables storing dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.
- Multi-Datacenter - Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box. This means users can have a Consul cluster that spans multiple datacenters.
- Service Segmentation - Consul Connect enables secure service-to-service connections with automatic TLS encryption and identity-based authorization.
Consul runs on Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows. It is commonly used to connect and secure services across any runtime platform and public or private cloud.