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Solution

Application Networking

Automate the network discovery, connection and deployment of your applications

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Your challenge

Multi-cloud is a core strategy and a natural progression as organizations migrate to the public cloud. 

Enterprises are creating a mix of applications across varied runspaces in the cloud, on-premises, and leveraging microservices.  Regardless of where they live, they need to integrate and communicate with one another. 

Given this complexity, organizations often struggle to manage and connect their services consistently across different clouds, platforms, and runtimes.

HashiCorp Consul leverages service discovery and service mesh patterns to help solve these challenges.  This enables organizations to securely connect, observe, and deploy their networked applications more quickly. Additionally, applying zero trust security best practices help customers securely network all aspects of their application estate.

Automate networking for simple and secure app delivery across clouds

HashiCorp Consul helps organizations securely connect and observe applications using service discovery and service mesh patterns.

HashiCorp Products used
  • Consul

Outcomes

  • 1

    Increase application resiliency and uptime

    Instantly discover new services with a centralized registry, and perform health checks to keep microservices online and performing as expected.
  • 2

    Accelerate application deployments

    Reduce app deployment times by automating load balancing updates, firewall changes, and other complex networking tasks.
  • 3

    Improve security across service-to-service communications

    Run a consistent platform for modern application networking and security with identity-based authorization, L7 traffic management, and service-to-service encryption.

Consul enables us to fully automate networking tasks across our data center environment to provide improved, self-service alternatives to the most time-consuming aspects of our work and significantly accelerate application delivery.

Daniel Greene
Principal Systems Engineer, Pandora

Drive consistent and automated networking workflows

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Securely connect applications on any runtime with Consul service mesh

Use Consul service mesh to securely connect applications across any cloud or on-premises environments, and across any runtime including VMs, Kubernetes, or HashiCorp Nomad. 

  • Enables a consistent dataplane that allows developers to connect their services between heterogeneous environments regardless of whether they are running on VMs in an on-premises datacenter or on a managed Kubernetes service like EKS, AKS, or GKE. 
  • Supports true multi-tenancy with Administrative Partitions. Multiple deployments can remain under a single control plane allowing for consistent management and governance while maintaining autonomy and isolation for different tenants. 
  • Operators can choose to self-manage their own Consul Enterprise deployments or opt for a fully managed solution with HCP Consul.
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Simplify service networking for Kubernetes with Consul

Consul is a robust service mesh for discovering and securely connecting applications on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes and service mesh go hand and hand. Organizations that adopt Kubernetes are looking for a way to automate, secure, and observe the connections between pods and clusters. Consul and Kubernetes provide a scalable and highly resilient platform for microservices that supports any Kubernetes runtime including hosted solutions like EKS, AKS, GKE, and OpenShift.

  • Multi-platform: Supports both Kubernetes and non-Kubernetes workloads on any runtime.
  • Kube-native workflow: Use Consul’s Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to interact with Kubernetes to reduce application deployment times.
  • Observable: Use built a in UI and enable Kubernetes metrics via Helm configuration to provide enhanced observability and monitor Kubernetes performance.
  • Secure: Offload security concerns from applications based on security policies to connect almost any application to any runtime.
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Automate networking workflows to improve delivery times and reduce misconfigurations

New technologies help accelerate application deployment times. However, legacy systems and old practices cannot keep up with the rate of change of modern applications.  Adopting Network Infrastructure Automation (NIA) with Consul-Terraform-Sync ensures networking and security infrastructure safely adapts to changes. 

  • Consul-Terraform-Sync automates various networking tasks and workflows based on changes observed by Consul. 
  • Trigger network changes via events like the scaling of service instances, change of service address or port number, updates to service tags, metadata, or health, etc. 
  • Improve application delivery times and greatly reduce the chance of misconfigurations.
      security-automation_graphic2.png

      Enforce zero trust networking to improve application security

      Consul is a core component of the HashiCorp zero trust security model. Consul enforces zero trust by using identity-based access to ensure all communication within the service mesh is authenticated with TLS certificates and encrypted in transit.

      • Supports a built-in Certificate Authority (CA), HashiCorp Vault, and AWS PCA to automatically generate and rotate TLS certificates used to authenticate and encrypt communication. 
      • Consul's service intentions provide control to developers to ensure only the specified services are allowed to communicate. 
      • Consul has native integrations that support Vault to centralize certificate and secrets management.

      Learn from your peers

      Tide's Self-Service Service Mesh With Consul

      Learn how Tide adopted Consul this year within six weeks, across both ECS-EC2 and ECS-Fargate with no downtime and no big-bang migration.

      Jez Halford avatar

      Jez Halford

      Head of Cloud Engineering at Tide Business Banking

      Take the next step

      Consul provide advanced application networking tools to help manage service discovery, network infrastructure automation and service mesh across all your cloud environments.

      Learn more

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