Using Consul and Kubernetes namespaces

Consul Enterprise 1.7+ supports Consul namespaces. When Kubernetes pods are registered into Consul, you can control which Consul namespace they are registered into.

There are three options available:

1. Single Destination Namespace – Register all Kubernetes pods, regardless of namespace, into the same Consul namespace.

   This can be configured with:

   global:
     enableConsulNamespaces: true
   
   connectInject:
     enabled: true
     consulNamespaces:
       consulDestinationNamespace: 'my-consul-ns'
   

   NOTE: If the destination namespace does not exist we will create it.

2. Mirror Namespaces - Register each Kubernetes pod into a Consul namespace with the same name as its Kubernetes namespace. For example, pod foo in Kubernetes namespace ns-1 will be synced to the Consul namespace ns-1. If a mirrored namespace does not exist in Consul, it will be created.

   This can be configured with:

   global:
     enableConsulNamespaces: true
   
   connectInject:
     enabled: true
     consulNamespaces:
       mirroringK8S: true
   

3. Mirror Namespaces With Prefix - Register each Kubernetes pod into a Consul namespace with the same name as its Kubernetes namespace with a prefix. For example, given a prefix k8s-, pod foo in Kubernetes namespace ns-1 will be synced to the Consul namespace k8s-ns-1.

   This can be configured with:

   global:
     enableConsulNamespaces: true
   
   connectInject:
     enabled: true
     consulNamespaces:
       mirroringK8S: true
       mirroringK8SPrefix: 'k8s-'