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-consul
-======
+# Consul
 
-Consul is a tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration
+* Website: http://www.consul.io
+* IRC: `#consul` on Freenode
+* Mailing list: [Google Groups](https://groups.google.com/group/consul/)
+
+Consul is a tool for managing and coordinating infrastructure. To do that
+it provides several key features:
+
+* Service Discovery - Services can register themselves and to easily
+  discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface.
+
+* 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.
+
+* Key/Value Store - 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.
+
+* Multi-Datacenter - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can support
+  any number of regions without complex configuration.
+
+Consul runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is recommended to run the
+Consul servers on Linux however.
+
+## Quick Start
+
+First, [download a pre-built Consul binary](http://www.consul.io/downloads.html)
+for your operating system or [compile Consul yourself](#developing-consul).
+
+An extensive quick quick start is viewable on the Consul website:
+
+http://www.consul.io/intro/getting-started/
+
+## Documentation
+
+Full, comprehensive documentation is viewable on the Consul website:
+
+http://www.consul.io/docs
+
+## Developing Consul
+
+If you wish to work on Consul itself, you'll first need [Go](http://golang.org)
+installed (version 1.2+ is _required_). Make sure you have Go properly installed,
+including setting up your [GOPATH](http://golang.org/doc/code.html#GOPATH).
+
+Next, clone this repository into `$GOPATH/src/github.com/hashicorp/consul` and
+then just type `make`. In a few moments, you'll have a working `consul` executable:
+
+```
+$ make
+...
+$ bin/consul
+...
+```
+
+*note: `make` will also place a copy of the binary in the first part of your $GOPATH*
+
+You can run tests by typing `make test`.
+
+If you make any changes to the code, run `make format` in order to automatically
+format the code according to Go standards.