The Life of a Packet Through Consul Service Mesh

We are pleased to release our first deep-dive white paper covering Consul service mesh. This white paper is intended for practitioners who want to gain a deeper understanding of how Consul service mesh works under the hood and learn how various components like Consul servers, Consul clients, and Envoy sidecar proxies work together.

This white paper is intended for practitioners who want to gain a deeper understanding of how Consul service mesh works under the hood and learn how various components like Consul servers, Consul clients, and Envoy sidecar proxies work together. A good understanding of service mesh concepts and HashiCorp Consul in general is required to get the most value out of this paper.

The paper starts with a historical overview of networking and compute technologies and their evolution over the last few years. It then looks at the challenges networking operators face with keeping up with more modern runtimes. From there, we also explore container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and multi-cloud environments in the modern enterprise environment.

The white paper covers all aspects around Consul service mesh including:

• Getting started with service registration and deploying sidecar proxies
• How the Envoy sidecar proxy instances get bootstrapped and configured during runtime
• Session establishment between service endpoints in a single Consul datacenter
• How Mesh Gateways interconnect federated Consul datacenters on the service mesh level

Along with the overall architecture and functionality of a Consul environment, this white paper includes explanations on how the various Layer 7 (L7) traffic management features in Consul service mesh operate at a control-plane level. Details are also provided on how these configuration options impact the actual Envoy data-plane underneath with examples.