Consul
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. These workloads provide your application's services with the following Consul functions:
- Register services to the Consul catalog.
- Update service status in the catalog in response to health checks..
- Resolve services with Consul DNS.
When you run a Consul client agent on a node, your application can also take advantage of the following Consul functions:
- Deploy and manage sidecar proxies.
- Secure service-to-service communication.
- Monitor services.
- Manage service traffic.
When you run a Consul dataplane, a lightweight process communicates with the Envoy proxies already running alongside your application workloads. Dataplanes let 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.
Guidance
The following resources are available to help you deploy Consul alongside your application workloads.
Deploy Consul client agents
The process to deploy a Consul client agent depends on your runtime:
- Deploy a Consul client agent on virtual machines
- Deploy a Consul client agent on Kubernetes
- Deploy a Consul client agent on Docker
Deploy Consul dataplanes
The process to deploy a Consul dataplane depends on your runtime:
HCP Consul Dedicated
When you use HCP Consul Dedicated clusters, you must deploy Consul alongside your workloads. Refer to the following pages in the HCP Consul Dedicated documentation: