Controlling access with access control

At the heart of Consul's functionality is a distributed key/value store. Through the gossip protocol, anything that one node learns can be shared with other nodes in the cluster. This not only applies to our three main use cases, but often, operators will utilize Consul to distribute configuration parameters that the associated components can utilize. This can be very helpful if you want to quickly change the logging level on all machines. This is especially the reason why, in any production deployment, the importance of securing Consul can't be understated. Utilizing the TLS keys, as we discussed in the previous section, we can validate and secure the communications between the clients and the servers. If we didn't do this, it would be possible for somebody to pretend to be part of the cluster.

The access control system within Consul provides an additional level of control regarding what each node can do on the network –...