The Consul Roadmap Through a Fictional Example — HashiConf Global 2021

Learn about the adoption stages of HashiCorp Consul through a fictional company's example, and see what the future features of Consul will be.

Update: Effective November 2024, HashiCorp has deprecated HCP Consul Central (aka HCP Consul management plane) as part of an effort to streamline offerings and focus on delivering the best possible solutions to customers. This helps accelerate product development in other areas of Consul to meet customer demands.

This presentation walks through the adoption journey of Consul using the example of “Space Odysseys,” a mythical Space Exploration company, as they go from a startup to being in the Fortune 500. Through this journey, they experience many networking and security challenges.

»Consul Adoption, From Discovery, to NIA, to Service Mesh

Preetha Appan, Sr. Director of Engineering for Consul, and Neena Pemmaraju, Director of Consul Product will step through the journey as the fictional company’s needs and challenges advance. The order of patterns is as follows:

1. Service discovery

2. Custom load balancing (service networking configuration propagation at scale)

3. Network infrastructure automation (via Consul-Terraform-Sync)

4. Service Mesh and progressive delivery

5. Ingress + Terminating Gateways

»Consul in Multiple Datacenters

And the next stage of patterns involves managing Consul across datacenters, taking advantage of three major features:

• Federation

• Cross-datacenter mesh gateways

• Hub and spoke network areas

»Coming Soon

Finally we look ahead to the future of what Consul soon will be able to do:

• API Gateway

• Multi-tenancy through admin partitions

• Consul on ECS

And a few additional themes of the future roadmap are discussed:

• Adding Azure and Google Cloud as options for HCP Consul

• Communication between HCP and self-managed Consul

• Simplified deployment by reducing the number of client agents needed