HashiCorp Consul on Ubuntu 24.04

HashiCorp Consul is a distributed service mesh and service discovery platform designed to simplify networking between services in dynamic infrastructure environments. It allows organizations to automatically discover services, monitor their health, and securely connect them using mutual TLS, without relying on hard-coded IP addresses or manual configuration.

Consul is widely used in cloud-native, microservices, and hybrid infrastructure setups to manage service registration, configuration, and secure communication. It integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes, virtual machines, and multi-cloud environments, providing a unified control plane for service networking.

Features of HashiCorp Consul:

• Automatic service discovery using DNS and HTTP APIs.
• Built-in health checks for services and infrastructure.
• Secure service-to-service communication with mutual TLS.
• Key-value store for dynamic configuration management.
• Service mesh capabilities for traffic management and observability.
• Supports multi-cloud, hybrid, and Kubernetes environments.

To check if HashiCorp Consul is running and accessible, use the following steps:

 Start Consul: $ consul agent -dev

Check Consul status:
$ consul members

Verify service catalog:
$ consul catalog services

Access Consul Web UI:
http://:8500

Disclaimer: HashiCorp Consul is provided “as is” under applicable open-source licenses. Users are responsible for proper configuration, secure deployment, access control, and data protection when running Consul in production environments. It is strongly recommended to enable ACLs, use TLS encryption, restrict UI access, and maintain regular backups of Consul data. HashiCorp Consul is best suited for service discovery, configuration management, and secure service networking in distributed and cloud-native systems.