Consul Documentation

Consul is a service networking platform with many features for securing your service communications and automating network service management.

API Gateway solutions
Consul's API gateway enables external network clients to securely access applications and services.
Configuration management solutions
Consul supports static and dynamic service configurations based on service and node state.
Domain Name Service (DNS) solutions
Consul provides DNS functions including lookups, alternate domains, and access controls across runtimes and cloud providers.
Service discovery solutions
Consul's service discovery capabilities help you discover, track, and monitor the health of services within a network.
Service mesh solutions
Consul's service mesh features help you secure, manage, and observe service-to-service communication within a network.

Consul supports many application runtimes and cloud platforms, and enables service networking in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

If you are new to Consul, these resources can help you learn about Consul and quickly get started with its service networking features.

Consul fundamentals
This documentation sequence summarizes the core knowledge, interactions, configurations, and operations for new Consul users.
Get started with Consul on Virtual Machines
These tutorials include a GitHub repo and a hosted terminal sessions to help you deploy Consul on VMs and explore its service discovery and service mesh features.
Get started with Consul on Kubernetes
These tutorials include a GitHub repo help you deploy Consul on a Kubernetes cluster and explore its service discovery and service mesh features.
Migrate a monolith with Consul and Nomad
These tutorials include a GitHub repo to demonstrate how you can migrate a monolithic application to microservices, integrate it with Consul, run the application on Nomad, and then scale the application automatically.

The processes to install and manage Consul as a long-running daemon on multiple nodes in a network.

Deploy Consul
How to install and start Consul server agents, client agents, and dataplanes on nodes.
Secure Consul
How to set up and maintain secure communications with Consul agents, including ACLs, TLS, and gossip.
Manage multi-tenancy
How to use one Consul datacenter for multiple tenants, with admin partitions, namespaces, network segments, and sameness groups.
Manage Consul
How to manage and customize Consul's behavior, including DNS forwarding on nodes, server disaster recovery, rate limiting, and best practices for scale.
Monitor Consul
How to export Consul logs and telemetry for insight into agent behavior.
Upgrade Consul
How to update the Consul version running in datacenters.

The processes to register services and use Consul's service discovery and service mesh features with your application workloads.

Register services
How to define services and health checks and then register them with Consul.
Discover services
How to use Consul's service discovery features, including Consul DNS, service lookups, load balancing.
Connect service mesh
How to set up and use sidecar proxies in a Consul service mesh.
Secure north/south network access
How to configure, deploy, and use the Consul API gateway to secure network ingress and egress.
Expand east/west network traffic
How to connect Consul datacenters across regions, runtimes, and providers with WAN federation and cluster peering.
Secure service mesh traffic
How to secure service-to-service communication with service intentions and TLS certificates.
Manage service mesh traffic
How to route traffic between services in a service mesh, including service failover and progressive rollouts.
Observe service mesh traffic
How to observe service mesh telemetry and application performance, including Grafana.
Automate application configurations
How to automate Consul and applications to update dynamically, including the KV store, Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS), and Consul template.

Manage your network by configuring Consul agents, service definitions, health checks, as well as service mesh behavior and application configuration.