HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure Public Beta

We are pleased to announce that HashiCorp Consul Service (HCS) on Azure is now in public beta. HCS on Azure enables a team to provision HashiCorp-managed Consul clusters directly through the Azure Marketplace and easily leverage Consul’s service discovery and service mesh features within their Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or VM-based application environments.

During the public beta period, any user can access the service to conduct a proof-of-concept in a managed, pre-production Consul environment. For a live overview and demo of HCS on Azure and the public beta feature set, please register for the upcoming webinar below.

»Fully Managed Service Networking on Azure

HCS on Azure lowers the barrier to entry for an organization to implement secure service networking across any Azure compute environment by enabling application teams to:

• Offload provisioning, management, and upgrades of the Consul control plane to HashiCorp.
• Automatically leverage the latest built-in networking and security best practices.
• Implement service registration, service discovery, and service mesh in phases using a crawl/walk/run approach.
• Enable a secure and unified approach to service networking across all AKS and VM-based application environments:

»HCS on Azure Beta Program

Over 50 customers were enrolled in the private beta, with the majority expressing interest in multiple use cases and deployment scenarios (shown below on a percentage basis):

Feedback from private beta customers resulted in a number of security related enhancements, including configurable CIDR ranges, ACL bootstrapping, and elimination of public IP addresses—all of which are now available in the public beta. The following full set of features is available for HCS on Azure as of this announcement:

• Automated cluster creation
• Automatic patching and security upgrades
• Automatic backups with manual restore
• TLS encrypted control plane communication
• Access Control System (ACL) bootstrapping (NEW)
• Configurable CIDR ranges for VNet peering (NEW)
• Secure by default (no public IP addresses) (NEW)
• Secure Prometheus endpoint (NEW)
• AKS cluster configuration with Helm
• 24/7 monitoring
• Email support

»Next Steps and Resources

The recommended way to get started is through the HCS on Azure track in HashiCorp Learn. The following guides are available:

• Deploy Consul with HCS on Azure
• Connect VM-based Applications to HCS on Azure
• Connect AKS Applications to HCS on Azure

Another excellent resource is Cody De Arkland’s three-part blog series:

• Part 1: Introduction to HCS on Azure with AKS
• Part 2: Service Mesh with VM Workloads
• Part 3: Migrating Application Traffic between VMs and Kubernetes with HCS on Azure

If you would like to proceed directly to the Azure Marketplace for a test drive, click here. To sign up for status updates or request a demo, please visit the HCS on Azure landing page. If you are new to HashiCorp Consul, please visit the Consul Learn documentation to get started!