Consul
Deploy Consul
This topic provides an overview of the configurations and processes to deploy a Consul agent in your network.
A node must run Consul to connect to a Consul datacenter. It can run either as a server agent, or as a client agent or Consul dataplane that supports an application workload.
Consul editions
You can configure agents to run a specific edition of Consul.
| Edition | How to enable |
|---|---|
| Community edition | Enabled by default. |
| Enterprise | Configure license block in the agent configuration. |
| FIPS 140-2 compliant | Specify an alternate source binary or image. |
To find the package for a specific release, refer to releases.hashicorp.com. To learn more about the differences in Consul editions and their available features, refer to Consul edition fundamentals.
Documentation
The following resources are available to help you deploy Consul on nodes in your network.
To deploy a Consul server, refer to the instructions for your runtime:
- Deploy Consul servers on VMs
- Deploy Consul servers on Kubernetes
- Deploy Consul servers on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)
- Deploy Consul servers on Docker
By default, the servers you deploy use the WAL backend for the Raft index. To learn more, refer to WAL LogStore backend overview.
To deploy a Consul process alongside you application workloads, follow the instructions to deploy a client agent or Consul dataplanes:
- Deploy Consul client agents:
- Deploy Consul dataplanes:
You can also configure cloud auto-join so that nodes automatically join the Consul cluster when they start.
Tutorials
The following tutorials provide additional instruction in the process to deploy Consul agents.