HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh on Kubernetes Series - Part 1 - Introduction and Setup

Modern cloud-native architectures rely heavily on microservices, and Kubernetes has become the go-to platform for deploying, managing, and scaling these distributed applications. As the number of microservices grows, ensuring secure, reliable, and observable service-to-service communication becomes increasingly complex. This is where service mesh solutions, such as HashiCorp Consul, step in to provide a seamless approach to managing these challenges. In this blog post, we will delve into the integration of HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh with Kubernetes, exploring its architecture, features, and step-by-step deployment guide.

HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh on Kubernetes Series - Part 2 - Observability

Modern service meshes require robust observability to ensure seamless operations, proactive troubleshooting, and performance optimization. In this section, we explore the observability features of HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh, including visualizing the service mesh, querying metrics, distributed tracing, and logging and auditing.

Visualizing the Service Mesh

The Consul UI is used for visualizing the service mesh and its topology.

Use the watch command to send requests to the application continually. Make sure HTTP status code 200 is returned in the output.

HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh on Kubernetes Series - Part 4 - Security

Security is a fundamental aspect of any service mesh, ensuring that all service-to-service communication is secure, controlled, and auditable. HashiCorp Consul provides robust security features, including mutual TLS (mTLS), access control, and rate limiting.

mTLS

In this section, we will demonstrate mTLS with Consul. Consul enables and strictly enforces mTLS by default. All traffic sent through the Consul Connect Service Mesh is encrypted.

This section is slightly different from the Istio mTLS section because: