--- description: |- Consul is a service networking solution to connect and secure services across any runtime platform and public or private cloud ---

Service Mesh made easy

Service discovery, identity-based authorization, and L7 traffic management abstracted from application code with proxies in the service mesh pattern

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The Challenge

Network appliances, like load balancers or firewalls with manual processes, don't scale in dynamic settings to support modern applications.
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East-west firewalls use IP-based rules to secure ingress and egress traffic. But in a dynamic world where services move across machines and machines are frequently created and destroyed, this perimeter-based approach is difficult to scale as it results in complex network topologies and a sprawl of short-lived firewall rules and proxy configuration.

The Solution

Service mesh as an automated and distributed approach to networking and security that can operate across platforms and private and public cloud
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Service mesh is a new approach to secure the service itself rather than relying on the network. Consul uses centrally managed service policies and configuration to enable dynamic routing and security based on sevice identity. These policies scale across datacenters and large fleets without IP-based rules or networking middleware.

Features

Layer 7 Traffic Management

Service-to-service communication policy at Layer 7 can be managed centrally, enabling advanced traffic management patterns such as service failover, path-based routing, and traffic shifting that can be applied across public and private clouds, platforms, and networks.

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Kind = "service-splitter" Name = "billing-api" Splits = [ { Weight = 10 ServiceSubset = "v2" }, { Weight = 90 ServiceSubset = "v1" }, ]

Layer 7 Observability

Centrally managed service observability at Layer 7 including detailed metrics on all service-to-service communication such as connections, bytes transferred, retries, timeouts, open circuits, and request rates, response codes.

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Metrics dashboard

Secure services across any runtime platform

Secure communication between legacy and modern workloads. Sidecar proxies allow applications to be integrated without code changes and Layer 4 support provides nearly universal protocol compatibility.

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Secure services across any runtime platform

Certificate-Based Service Identity

TLS certificates are used to identify services and secure communications. Certificates use the SPIFFE format for interoperability with other platforms. Consul can be a certificate authority to simplify deployment, or integrate with external signing authorities like Vault.

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Vault Spiffe

Encrypted communication

All traffic between services is encrypted and authenticated with mutual TLS. Using TLS provides a strong guarantee of the identity of services communicating, and ensures all data in transit is encrypted.

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$ consul connect proxy -service web \ -service-addr 127.0.0.1:8000 -listen 10.0.1.109:7200 ==> Consul Connect proxy starting... Configuration mode: Flags Service: web Public listener: 10.0.1.109:7200 => 127.0.0.1:8000 ... $ tshark -V \ -Y "ssl.handshake.certificate" \ -O "ssl" \ -f "dst port 7200" Frame 39: 899 bytes on wire (7192 bits), 899 bytes captured (7192 bits) on interface 0 Internet Protocol Version 4, Src: 10.0.1.110, Dst: 10.0.1.109 Transmission Control Protocol, Src Port: 61918, Dst Port: 7200, Seq: 136, Ack: 916, Len: 843 Secure Sockets Layer TLSv1.2 Record Layer: Handshake Protocol: Certificate Version: TLS 1.2 (0x0303) Handshake Protocol: Certificate RDNSequence item: 1 item (id-at-commonName=Consul CA 7) RelativeDistinguishedName item (id-at-commonName=Consul CA 7) Id: 2.5.4.3 (id-at-commonName) DirectoryString: printableString (1) printableString: Consul CA 7

Mesh Gateway

Connect between different cloud regions, VPCs and between overlay and underlay networks without complex network tunnels and NAT. Mesh Gateways solve routing at TLS layer while preserving end-to-end encryption and limiting attack surface area at the edge of each network.

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Mesh gateway diagram

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