Consul – Service Networking

HashiCorp Consul is a service networking solution that provides service discovery, configuration, and segmentation. It enables secure service communication in dynamic infrastructure.

Key Features

• Service Discovery: Automatic service registration
• Health Checking: Application-level monitoring
• KV Store: Dynamic configuration
• Service Mesh: mTLS and intentions
• Multi-Datacenter: WAN federation support

Installation

Install Consul on Ubuntu:

wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install consul

Usage Examples

Consul operations:

# Start agent in dev mode
consul agent -dev

# Register service
consul services register -name=web -port=8080

# Query services
consul catalog services

# Get service health
consul health checks web

# KV operations
consul kv put config/db host=localhost
consul kv get config/db

Benefits

Consul simplifies service networking in distributed systems. Its integrated service mesh and discovery capabilities enable secure microservices communication.

Download Consul