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# Consul [](https://circleci.com/gh/hashicorp/consul/tree/master) [](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/c/consul)
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* Website: https://www.consul.io
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* Tutorials: [https://learn.hashicorp.com ](https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul )
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* Forum: [Discuss ](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/c/consul )
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Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is
distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
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Consul provides several key features:
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* **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.
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* **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.
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* **Service Segmentation/Service Mesh** - Consul Connect 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 without being aware of Connect at all.
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* **Key/Value Storage** - 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.
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* **Multi-Datacenter** - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can
support any number of regions without complex configuration.
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Consul runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows. A commercial
version called [Consul Enterprise ](https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul )
is also available.
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**Please note**: We take Consul's security and our users' trust very seriously. If you
believe you have found a security issue in Consul, please [responsibly disclose ](https://www.hashicorp.com/security#vulnerability-reporting ) by
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contacting us at security@hashicorp.com.
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## Quick Start
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A few quick start guides are available on the Consul website:
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* **Standalone binary install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/getting-started/install
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* **Minikube install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/kubernetes/minikube
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* **Kubernetes install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/kubernetes/kubernetes-deployment-guide
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## Documentation
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Full, comprehensive documentation is available on the Consul website:
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https://www.consul.io/docs
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## Contributing
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Thank you for your interest in contributing! Please refer to [CONTRIBUTING.md ](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md ) for guidance.
