open-consul/README.md

Consul

• Website: https://www.consul.io
• Tutorials: https://learn.hashicorp.com
• Forum: Discuss

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

Consul provides several key features:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows. A commercial version called Consul Enterprise is also available.

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 by contacting us at security@hashicorp.com.

Quick Start

A few quick start guides are available on the Consul website:

• Standalone binary install: https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/getting-started/install
• Minikube install: https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/kubernetes/minikube
• Kubernetes install: https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/kubernetes/kubernetes-deployment-guide

Documentation

Full, comprehensive documentation is available on the Consul website:

https://www.consul.io/docs

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing! Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for guidance.