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# What is Consul?
HashiCorp Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services and across on-prem and multi-cloud environments and runtimes. Consul offers service discovery, configuration, and traffic management functionality. You can use these features individually, or together as a complete service mesh solution.
HashiCorp Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services and across on-prem and multi-cloud environments and runtimes. Consul offers service discovery, service mesh, traffic management, and automated updates to network infrastructure device. You can use these features individually or together in a single Consul deployment.
> **Hands-on**: Complete the Getting Started tutorials to learn how to deploy Consul:
- [Get Started on Kubernetes](https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/consul/gs-consul-service-mesh)
- [Get Started on VMs](https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/consul/getting-started)
- [HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Consul](https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/consul/cloud-get-started)
## How does Consul work?
Consul provides a _control plane_ that enables you to register, query, and secure services deployed across your network. The control plane is the part of the network infrastructure that maintains a central registry to track services and their respective IP addresses. It is a distributed system that runs on clusters of nodes, such as physical servers, cloud instances, virtual machines, or containers.
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The core Consul workflow consists of the following stages:
- **Register**: Teams add services to the Consul catalog. The catalog is a central registry that lets services automatically discover each other without requiring a human operator to modify application code, deploy additional load balancers, or hardcode IP addresses. Teams can manually [define and register services](/docs/discovery/services) using the CLI or the API, or you can automate the process in Kubernetes with [service sync](/docs/k8s/service-sync). Services can also include health checks so that Consul can monitor for unhealthy services.
- **Register**: Teams add services to the Consul catalog, which is a central registry that lets services automatically discover each other without requiring a human operator to modify application code, deploy additional load balancers, or hardcode IP addresses. It is the runtime source of truth for all services and their addresses. Teams can manually [define and register services](/docs/discovery/services) using the CLI or the API, or you can automate the process in Kubernetes with [service sync](/docs/k8s/service-sync). Services can also include health checks so that Consul can monitor for unhealthy services.
- **Query**: Consul’s identity-based DNS lets you find healthy services in the Consul catalog. Services registered with Consul provide health information, access points, and other data that help you control the flow of data through your network. Your services only access other services through their local proxy according to the identity-based policies you define.
- **Secure**: After services locate upstreams, Consul ensures that service-to-service communication is authenticated, authorized, and encrypted. Consul service mesh secures microservice architectures with mTLS and can allow or restrict access based on service identities, regardless of differences in compute environments and runtimes.
@ -47,15 +45,17 @@ Adopting a microservices architecture on cloud infrastructure is a critical step
### Connect services across runtimes and cloud providers
The shift to cloud has evolved. Organizations have adopted a multi-cloud strategy where customer value is delivered on various runtimes and cloud providers, which can lead to inconsistency and technical debt. Consul routes network traffic to any runtime or infrastructure environment your services need to reach using proxies. You can also use Consul API Gateway to route traffic into and out of the network. Consul service mesh provides additional capabilities, such as securing communication between services, traffic management, and observability, with no application code changes.
Modern organizations may deploy services to a combination of on-prem infrastructure environments and public cloud providers across multiple regions. Services may run on bare metal, virtual machines, or as containers across Kubernetes clusters.
Consul also has many integrations with Kubernetes that enable you to leverage Consul features in containerized environments. For example, Consul can automatically inject sidecar proxies into Kubernetes Pods and sync Kubernetes Services and non-Kubernetes services into the Consul service registry.
Consul routes network traffic to any runtime or infrastructure environment your services need to reach. You can also use Consul API Gateway to route traffic into and out of the network. Consul service mesh provides additional capabilities, such as securing communication between services, traffic management, and observability, with no application code changes.
Consul also has many integrations with Kubernetes that enable you to leverage Consul features in containerized environments. For example, Consul can automatically inject sidecar proxies into Kubernetes Pods and sync Kubernetes Services and non-Kubernetes services into the Consul service registry without manual changes to the application or changing the Pod definition.
You can also schedule Consul workloads with [HashiCorp Nomad](https://www.nomadproject.io/) to provide secure service-to-service communication between Nomad jobs and task groups.
### Enable zero-trust network security
Microservice architectures expose more of a network’s surface area, which demand additional security measures to prevent unwanted access by malicious actors. Consul provides several mechanisms that enhance network security without any changes to your application code, including mutual transport layer security (mTLS) encryption on all traffic between services and Consul intentions, which are service-to-service permissions that you can manage through the Consul UI, API, and CLI.
Microservice architectures are complex and difficult to secure against accidental discloser to malicious actors. Consul provides several mechanisms that enhance network security without any changes to your application code, including mutual transport layer security (mTLS) encryption on all traffic between services and Consul intentions, which are service-to-service permissions that you can manage through the Consul UI, API, and CLI.
When you deploy Consul to Kubernetes clusters, you can also integrate with [HashiCorp Vault](http://vaultproject.io) to manage sensitive data. By default, Consul on Kubernetes leverages Kubernetes secrets as the backend system. Kubernetes secrets are base64 encoded, unencrypted, and lack lease or time-to-live properties. By leveraging Vault as a secrets backend for Consul on Kubernetes, you can manage and store Consul related secrets within a centralized Vault cluster to use across one or many Consul on Kubernetes datacenters. Refer to [Vault as the Secrets Backend](/docs/k8s/installation/vault) for additional information.
@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ Outages are unavoidable, but with distributed systems it is critical that a powe
### Dynamically update network infrastructure devices
Changes to your network, such as outdated firewall or load balancer rules, can lead to problems that disrupt operations at critical moments. You can deploy the Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) add-on to dynamically update network infrastructure devices when a service changes. CTS monitors the service information stored in Consul and automatically launches an instance of HashiCorp Terraform to drive relevant changes to the network infrastructure when Consul registers a change, reducing the manual effort of configuring network infrastructure.
Change to your network, including day-to-day operational tasks such as updating network device endpoints and firewall or load balancer rules, can lead to problems that disrupt operations at critical moments. You can deploy the Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) add-on to dynamically update network infrastructure devices when a service changes. CTS monitors the service information stored in Consul and automatically launches an instance of HashiCorp Terraform to drive relevant changes to the network infrastructure when Consul registers a change, reducing the manual effort of configuring network infrastructure.
### Optimize traffic routes for deployment and testing scenarios