HashiCorp Consul 1.0

Today we are excited to announce the public availability of HashiCorp Consul 1.0. Consul is a tool for service discovery and runtime configuration for distributed applications and infrastructure. Consul joins Vagrant and Packer as the third HashiCorp product to reach the 1.0 milestone.

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The product has added significant functionality since it was released in April 2014 and today is used on millions of machines across many of the world's largest companies like SAP, Comcast, and Citadel. Consul 1.0 highlights include HCL configuration files and many smaller improvements, fixes, and cleaned up interfaces. Consul 1.0 Enterprise is highlighted by Sentinel integration to enforce policies on Consul's key/value store and service registration. For more information on Consul Enterprise visit https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul/.

You can find the full list of changes in all Consul releases leading up to 1.0 in the Changelog. There are a number of breaking changes in this release, so please be sure to read the upgrade notes for 1.0.

»HashiCorp Consul

Consul 0.1 was released in 2014 to address the challenges of running and maintaining a microservices architecture. Since that initial release, Consul has consistently added new functionality to make it easier to build robust service oriented applications. The Consul open source offering addresses the technical core challenges of service discovery, monitoring, coordination, and runtime configuration, while the Consul Enterprise offering addresses the organizational challenges of collaboration and governance.

Prior to Consul, organizations built homegrown service discovery solutions to connect their growing number of dynamic microservices. Consul provides a rich set of features for managing services with a design that is distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes and services across multiple datacenters.

Consul is part of the HashiCorp product suite that enables you to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. Consul can be used by each component of the modular suite — Nomad can use Consul to register services, Vault can use Consul as a highly-available storage backend, and Terraform can set Consul configuration using infrastructure as code.

»Team and Community

We want to thank our community and the Consul core team for bringing Consul to 1.0! HashiCorp Consul has over 360 contributors since it began 3 years ago. These contributors have added features, fixed bugs, and helped Consul grow over the years. The community's testing, improvements, and suggestions have made Consul what it is today.

At HashiCorp, James Phillips has led the charge towards 1.0. He became engineering lead of the project in 2015 and has been the primary maintainer ever since. James is joined by Kyle Havlovitz, Frank Schröder, and Preetha Appan. HashiCorp Research has also contributed through Lifeguard—Making Gossip More Robust with Lifeguard—thanks to Jon Currey and Armon Dadgar. Together, this team continues to develop Consul and make it a trusted component of modern application architectures.

»Looking Forward

The release of Consul 1.0 is a huge milestone. HashiCorp takes the 1.0 designation very seriously and previously discussed what a 1.0 milestone means in the HashiCorp Packer 1.0 announcement. We feel that Consul has hit a threshold of broad usage, feature richness, and operational maturity to be labeled as such. However, this does not mean that Consul is done. Since 2014, infrastructure has continued to evolve and Consul must adapt as well. We look forward to sharing more as Consul advances past this milestone!