Service Mesh Proxy Overview

A Connect-aware proxy enables unmodified applications to use Connect. A per-service proxy sidecar transparently handles inbound and outbound service connections, automatically wrapping and verifying TLS connections. Consul includes its own built-in L4 proxy and has first class support for Envoy. You can choose other proxies to plug in as well. This section describes how to configure Envoy or the built-in proxy using Connect, and how to integrate the proxy of your choice.

To ensure that services only allow external connections established via the Connect protocol, you should configure all services to only accept connections on a loopback address.

Deprecation Note: Managed Proxies are a deprecated method for deploying sidecar proxies, and have been removed in Consul 1.6. See managed proxy deprecation for more information. If you are using managed proxies we strongly recommend that you switch service definitions for registering proxies.

Dynamic Upstreams Require Native Integration

If an application requires dynamic dependencies that are only available at runtime, it must natively integrate with Connect. After natively integrating, the HTTP API or DNS interface can be used.

Connect proxies do not currently support dynamic upstreams.