---
layout: "docs"
page_title: "Guides"
sidebar_current: "docs-guides"
description: |-
  This section provides various guides for common actions. Due to the nature of Consul, some of these procedures can be complex, so our goal is to provide guidance to do them safely.
---

# Consul Guides

This section provides various guides for common actions. Due to the nature
of Consul, some of these procedures can be complex, so our goal is to provide
guidance to do them safely.

The following guides are available:

* [Autopilot](/docs/guides/autopilot.html) - This guide covers Autopilot, which provides automatic operator-friendly management of Consul servers.

* [Adding/Removing Servers](/docs/guides/servers.html) - This guide covers how to safely add and remove Consul servers from the cluster. This should be done carefully to avoid availability outages.

* [Bootstrapping](/docs/guides/bootstrapping.html) - This guide covers bootstrapping a new datacenter. This covers safely adding the initial Consul servers.

* [DNS Caching](/docs/guides/dns-cache.html) - Enabling TTLs for DNS query caching

* [DNS Forwarding](/docs/guides/forwarding.html) - Forward DNS queries from Bind to Consul

* [External Services](/docs/guides/external.html) - This guide covers registering an external service. This allows using 3rd party services within the Consul framework.

* Federation ([Basic](/docs/guides/datacenters.html) and [Advanced](/docs/guides/areas.html)) - Configuring Consul to support multiple datacenters.

* [Leader Election](/docs/guides/leader-election.html) - The goal of this guide is to cover how to build client-side leader election using Consul.

* [Outage Recovery](/docs/guides/outage.html) - This guide covers recovering a cluster that has become unavailable due to server failures.

* [Server Performance](/docs/guides/performance.html) - This guide covers minumum requirements for Consul servers as well as guidelines for running Consul servers in production.

* [Semaphore](/docs/guides/semaphore.html) - This guide covers using the KV store to implement a semaphore.