Preface

Have you ever spent hours troubleshooting a network, only to realize the network addresses for your applications changed? Or perhaps you've had to deflect flying coffee mugs from irate project managers because it is taking weeks to update a firewall or load balancer. Maybe your engineering teams are struggling with end-to-end encryption between their services, reinventing the wheel with every project, or leaving security up to the fictitious perimeter surrounding the network. If these situations sound familiar, HashiCorp Consul just might be the answer for your woes!

Consul provides a platform-independent solution for service discovery, network automation, and secure service communications. This book walks through the foundation of the Consul architecture, explaining how the servers and clients operate. We'll build our own Consul system in Amazon Web Services, and secure the system against cowans and eavesdroppers. With an established cluster, we'll start deploying services into the system, and show how Consul discovers and monitors these services. Multiple methods of sharing service information will be discussed. However, the continuing focus is on how Consul utilizes this information to dynamically adjust network infrastructure and facilitate secure connections among the registered services. Finally, we'll do a quick walk-through of HCP Consul, a Software as a Service solution offered on HashiCorp Cloud Platform.