•  Install
•  Tutorials
•  Documentation

Sandbox

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  Consul sandbox

  The Consul sandbox contains preinstalled tools and services for you to experiment with Consul.

Introduction to Consul: Architecture and Concepts

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  Control plane architecture

  Consul provides a control plane that enables you to register, access, and secure services deployed across your network.
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  Data plane architecture

  Consul can deploy gateways and sidecar proxies in an application's data plane to help you secure, observe, and manage application traffic.
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  Concept: Consul catalog

  The Consul catalog API tracks registered services and their locations for both service discovery and service mesh use cases.
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  Concept: Cluster consensus

  Consul ensures a consistent state using the Raft protocol. A quorum, or a majority of server agents with one leader, agree to state changes before committing to the state log.
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  Concept: Gossip communication

  Consul agents manage membership in datacenters and WAN federations using the Serf protocol, also called gossip communication.

Consul Fundamentals

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  Consul editions and releases

  Consul releases include Enterprise and Community editions. Additional tool binaries for managing Consul on specific runtimes and cloud providers is also available.
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  How to install Consul

  Install Consul to get started with service discovery and service mesh. Follow the installation instructions to download the precompiled binary, or use Go to compile from source.
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  Run Consul in developer mode

  Consul can deploy gateways and sidecar proxies in an application's data plane to help you secure, observe, and manage application traffic.
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  Explore the Consul HTTP API

  The Consul HTTP API is a RESTful interface for Consul that exposes endpoints for both Consul operations and service networking functions that return JSON payloads.
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  Explore the Consul CLI

  TThe Consul CLI is a wrapper for the HTTP API that allows you to interact with Consul from a terminal session.
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  Explore the Consul UI

  The Consul UI allows you to interact with Consul using a browser-based graphical user interface.
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  Identity in Consul

  In a datacenter, Consul uses identity to associate agents, configurations, and services on different nodes that may have different names but are otherwise identical.
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  Consul agent basics

  The Consul agent is a long running daemon that operates on a node. It is a core unit of Consul operations.
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  Service and health check basics

  Consul agents require service definitions in order to register services into the Consul catalog.
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  Configuration entry basics

  Configuration entries explicitly define many of Consul's security, traffic, and cluster management behaviors.
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  Consul Terraform provider basics

  You can use the official Terraform provider to configure your Consul cluster's ACLs, configuration entries, intentions, and more.

Popular Use Cases

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  34min

  Register your services to Consul

  Deploy Consul client agents on your virtual machine workloads. Register services to Consul and set up health checks.

  • Consul
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  25min

  Securely connect your services with Consul service mesh

  Deploy Consul service mesh and secure your applications using Envoy.

  • Consul
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  25min

  Access services in your service mesh

  Use Consul API Gateway to enable external access to services inside the mesh.

  • Consul

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  5 tutorials

  Connect services

  Register services and health checks to Consul.

  • Consul
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  4 tutorials

  Control network traffic

  Control service traffic patterns with canary deployments, service splitters, chaos engineering practices, and Consul API Gateway.

  • Consul
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  4 tutorials

  Secure services

  Secure service to service traffic in Consul service mesh using service intentions, both at L4 and L7 level, and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to avoid unidentified traffic. Include new services in Consul service mesh gradually using permissive mTLS.

  • Consul
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  4 tutorials

  Observe your network

  Consul observability features enhance your service mesh capabilities with enriched metrics, logs, and distributed traces so you can improve performance and debug your distributed services with precision.

  • Consul
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  2 tutorials

  Network automation

  Automate infrastructure changes based on changes to the Consul catalog using Consul-Terraform-Sync and learn how Consul's built-in load balancing features help applications automatically adapt to changes in services.

  • Consul
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  4 tutorials

  Implement multi-tenancy

  Manage service tenancy with admin partitions, namespace, and cluster peering.

  • Consul

Get Certified

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  3 tutorials

  Prepare for the Consul Associate (003) certification exam

  Prepare for your Consul Associate certification exam. Choose to follow an in-depth guide or to review select exam topics depending on the kind of preparation support you need. Then review sample questions to learn what to expect on exam day.

  • Consul