Deploy Consul client agents and dataplanes for application workloads
This topic provides an overview of the process to configure and deploy Consul alongside your workloads so that server agents can communicate with the nodes where your services run.
Introduction
In addition to the server agents you deploy in your datacenter, you must run Consul workloads alongside services in your application's data plane. On virtual machines these workloads are called Consul clients. On container-focused virtualization platforms these workloads are called Consul Dataplane.
Consul Dataplane removes the need to run Consul client agents on every node in a containerised cluster for service discovery and service mesh. Instead, Consul deploys sidecar proxies that provide lower latency, support additional runtimes, and integrate with cloud infrastructure providers. Consul Dataplane offers the following functions:
- Register services to the Consul catalog.
- Monitor services and update service status in the catalog in response to health checks.
- Resolve services with Consul DNS.
- Secure service-to-service communication.
When you run Consul Dataplane, a lightweight process communicates with the Envoy proxies already running alongside your application workloads. Dataplane lets you use Consul's security, monitoring, and traffic management features when you already have sidecar proxies and health checks configured in Kubernetes or ECS. For more information, refer to Consul Dataplane architecture.
Guidance
The following resources are available to help you deploy Consul alongside your application workloads.