Announcing HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure Production Tier

We are pleased to announce the availability of the HashiCorp Consul Service (HCS) on Azure Production tier. The new offering enables a user to deploy production grade Consul clusters directly from the Microsoft Azure portal. Using an on-demand production cluster, an operator or practitioner can consume Consul for production workloads as needed (“pay as you go”)  to meet fluctuating demands efficiently. Production clusters are highly available, fully managed by HashiCorp, and backed by an uptime SLA.

HCS enables easy access to a range of Consul use cases including secure service-to-service communication with service mesh, automated network configuration, and service discovery. Consul can be used as a platform to support modern application networking, which includes progressive application delivery, zero-trust security, and service level observability. HCS clusters are preconfigured for production workloads, enabling a team to easily leverage Consul to secure the application networks within their Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or VM-based environments while offloading the operations to HashiCorp.

The Production tier supplements the Development and Annual tiers which were announced when HCS on Azure became generally available. The sections below summarize how the three HCS offerings combine to enable an individual or an organization of any size to easily consume Consul as a managed service, and to secure their application networks or implement service mesh across any runtime environment. For organizations requiring complex, multi-cloud architectures, or strict application resiliency and organizational compliance not met by a managed service, Consul can be self-hosted and maintained by the organization.

»Development

A new HCS user can get started by provisioning a non-production development cluster. Development clusters allow a user to evaluate key aspects of the service or execute a proof of concept without incurring the higher cost of a highly available production cluster.

Development clusters offer hourly pay-as-you-go billing and enable a user to experiment with any Consul open source or enterprise feature. For example, a user can configure Consul to be a central control plane for service discovery and health or to shape traffic across multiple Kubernetes clusters or VM environments using Consul’s Layer 7 traffic management capabilities. 

»Production (New)

The new Production tier enables an organization to deploy a highly available production grade Consul cluster on demand upon a successful evaluation or proof of concept with the Development tier. 

Production clusters are backed by the HashiCorp uptime SLA for cloud services and include a support SLA. Production clusters are also billed hourly based on the number of Consul client and server nodes attached to the cluster, offering a pay-as-you-go pricing structure.

»Annual

The Annual tier offers discounted rates for an annual commitment. Consul Enterprise features like namespaces, audit logging, and single sign-on are also available as part of this tier. The Enterprise features provide organizations with standard policies for controlling access to the cluster, leveraging a trusted identity source, and enabling auditing teams to have sufficient oversight. The Annual tier offers the same uptime SLA as the Production tier as well as access to improved support SLAs. Contact the HashiCorp enterprise sales team to learn more!

»Getting Started

To get started with an HCS development or production cluster, visit the HCS learn track or proceed directly to the listing on the Azure Marketplace. You can also visit our web page for more information or contact sales to learn more about discounted annual agreements and enterprise support for HCS.