Chapter 1: Consul Overview – Operation and Use Cases

Welcome to the wonderful world of HashiCorp Consul, a versatile utility to manage, automate, and securely connect all of the services within your network. Thanks for joining me on this ride, and I hope we'll both learn a lot throughout the process. Within this chapter, we're going to be reviewing Consul at a high level just to understand its basics and applications; essentially, we'll be digging the foundation and pouring the concrete to create a stable base on which to form your Consul structure. And if you've ever looked at the leaning tower of Pisa, you know that a solid foundation is critical for any important structure! Within this chapter, we'll be learning about the following:

• The Consul system – what are the components and how do they live together in harmony?
• Consul service discovery – touching on the foundational use case on which all of the other Consul functionality builds
• Consul service mesh – the basics of Consul service mesh to securely enable service-to-service communication
• Network automation – a high-level view of the application of service discovery to automate your network infrastructure

We won't be getting into any code snippets quite yet, but rest assured they are coming. If you're familiar with the concepts and use cases of Consul, go ahead and skip to those chapters – I promise I won't be hurt (too much). However, this would be an excellent chapter to hand your manager when they ask, what in the world are you doing with this newfangled invention?