Consul: Up and Running: Service Mesh for Any Runtime or Cloud

With the advent of microservices, Kubernetes, public cloud, and hybrid computing, site reliability and DevOps engineers are facing more complexity than ever before. Service mesh is an exciting new technology that promises to help tackle this complexity. A service mesh provides you with a unified control plane to manage the networking among your applications running on these distinct platforms. This definitive guide shows you how to automate networking for simple and secure application delivery with Consul.

Author Luke Kysow, Consul engineer at HashiCorp, demonstrates how this service mesh solution provides a software-driven approach to security, observability, and traffic management. Once you learn how to implement zero-trust networking by deploying Consul on multiple platforms, you'll be able to take control of application traffic, prevent outages, view metrics, integrate with legacy systems, and more.

• Dive into the characteristics of service meshes, zero-trust networking, and traffic-shaping patterns
• Deploy Consul on Kubernetes and virtual machines
• Learn how to secure, monitor, and manage your application traffic with Consul
• Use this guide to deploy and operate applications as a system administrator, DevOps engineer, or developer

From the Preface

Consul is a fully featured service mesh from HashiCorp, the company that also created Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Packer, and Vagrant. A small operations team can leverage Consul to impact security, reliability, observability, and application delivery across their entire stack—all without requiring developers to modify their underlying microservices.

In this book, you’ll learn to install, configure, and operate Consul in order to tame complexity and take back control of your infrastructure. I’m excited for you to start on your service mesh journey with Consul—let’s dig in and get up and running!

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re a platform or operations engineer tasked with maintaining a growing microservices environment on Kubernetes or VMs, then this book is for you. If you’re a microservices developer interested in increasing reliability or experimenting with advanced deployment strategies such as blue/green and canarying, this book is also for you. Or perhaps your organization is already using Consul and you’re looking to learn how it works at a deeper level and how to utilize it better.

This book will also be helpful for security engineers and higher-level decision-makers (managers, directors, VPs of engineering, and CTOs) to provide an overview of the concepts behind a service mesh and the value it provides.

This book assumes general knowledge of microservices development and networking concepts such as load balancers. It contains instructions for installing Consul on Kubernetes or Linux VMs and assumes that you will be familiar with one of those platforms. It contains exercises that you can complete on Windows, macOS, or Linux machines.

What Is Not in This Book

This book does not cover Consul features unrelated to its service mesh functionality. For example, Consul’s key/value store and Domain Name System (DNS) service discovery are not covered. Also, this book is not a detailed production-ready operations guide to Consul. The aim is to familiarize readers with Consul’s concepts and get them “up and running” with its functionality.

Navigating This Book

The book starts with service mesh fundamentals: what a service mesh is and how it works. Next, you’ll learn what makes Consul unique, its architecture, and the specific protocols it uses. With that groundwork in place, you’ll be ready to deploy Consul onto Kubernetes or VMs and add your services into the service mesh.

You’ll then learn to use Consul to secure your systems with zero trust networking, add observability, increase reliability, and control traffic. In the final chapter, I cover advanced topics such as multi-cluster deployment.

Throughout the book, I include exercises for both Kubernetes and VMs, so you can utilize these concepts with an actual microservices application. If you wish to follow along with the exercises, I recommend you complete the chapters in order since they often rely on one another.