Introduction

Why use HashiCorp Validated Designs?

HashiCorp Validated Designs (HVD) provide practitioners with opinionated guidance for achieving production-grade deployments of HashiCorp products. These designs are purpose-built for delivering foundational use cases, with a baseline level of architectural and operational maturity. They draw on the field experiences of Solutions Engineers and Solutions Architects working with customers across a wide range of environments and organizational requirements.

Each guide provides access to an opinionated reference architecture, including key design decisions and the rationale behind them. Where applicable, guides identify modular design components that you can adjust to align with organizational or regulatory requirements without compromising the overall integrity of the implementation. For many deployments we include Terraform modules to automate large portions of infrastructure provisioning and software installation.

Objective

The objective of this Consul Installation Guide is to assist you in deploying Consul Enterprise. Consul allows users to register services for service discovery use cases in a centralized registry, enabling the discovery, monitoring, and tracking of service health. Additionally, it supports service mesh use cases for secure service-to-service communication across multiple environments, platforms, and runtimes.

This guide addresses these objectives using two architectural patterns:

• Consul on virtual machines (VMs)
• Consul on Kubernetes

These patterns are adaptable to various cloud providers and on-premises environments, ensuring flexibility in deployment.

Audience

This document is designed for development, platform, networking, and application security teams seeking to implement Consul Enterprise to register, discover, and securely connect applications across cloud and datacenter environments.

This Installation Guide is for platform, infrastructure, security, and operations practitioners deploying self-hosted Consul Enterprise on virtual machines and Kubernetes. By the end of this guide, the Consul control plane is deployed, initially configured, and ready for day-2 administration and consumer use-case onboarding.

After deployment, use the Consul Administration Guide for day-2 operations and the Consul User Guide for service discovery, service mesh, and application-team workflows.

Supported versions

This version of the guide has been validated with the following versions of Consul Enterprise:

• Consul Enterprise 1.19.x+ent(opens in new tab)

Language and definitions

This documentation uses technology-agnostic terminology; however, some terms may vary slightly between cloud providers. Below are the definitions of key terms used throughout this document.