Consul is a service networking platform developed by HashiCorp that provides service discovery, service mesh, and distributed configuration capabilities. It’s part of HashiCorp’s infrastructure automation suite alongside Terraform, Vault, Nomad, and Packer.
Consul solves a fundamental problem in distributed systems: how services find and communicate with each other. Its service discovery feature maintains a real-time registry of all services and their health status. The service mesh capability, built on Envoy proxy, provides mutual TLS, traffic management, and authorization between services.
Consul works across multiple platforms — Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, and multiple cloud providers — making it popular in heterogeneous environments where not everything runs in containers. Its Key/Value store is used for dynamic configuration and feature flags.
HashiCorp offers Consul in open-source and enterprise editions, plus a fully managed HCP Consul cloud service. After IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp in 2024, Consul continues as both a community project (though now under the Business Source License) and an enterprise product. Consul is widely deployed in organizations that use other HashiCorp tools, creating a cohesive infrastructure management stack.
