Introduction

Note

These guides were reorganized in August 2026. The previous Solution Design Guide and Operating Guides (Adoption, Standardization, Scaling) have been replaced with three role-based guide types: Installation, Administration, and User. Read the HVD 2.0 release notes for full details on what changed and where to find the content you need.

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.

This User Guide is for platform and application teams consuming Consul Enterprise capabilities after the platform has been installed and handed over for operation. It covers service discovery, the service catalog, service mesh and gateways, multi-infrastructure service connectivity, deployment automation, and services with Consul client agents.

Note

Operator topics such as ACL governance, namespaces, admin partitions, cluster peering setup, observability, backup, restore, upgrades, and support readiness are covered in the Consul Administration Guide. Deployment architecture and install-time setup are covered in the Consul Installation Guide.

Warning

Please note that this document is a work in progress and is subject to change.

HashiCorp Validated Designs (HVDs) provide prescriptive guidance curated from our experience supporting numerous customer journeys with Consul Enterprise.

Use cases covered

This guide covers the Consul Enterprise capabilities that platform and application teams consume once the platform is installed and operational:

Use case	Summary
Multi-platform service discovery	Register services, configure health checks, and use the Consul service catalog across platforms.
Service discovery catalog	Use DNS discovery and prepared queries to discover registered Consul services.
Service mesh and gateways	Use Consul service mesh, gateways, and API gateways with HashiCups examples.
Multi-platform application deployment	Deploy example applications across Kubernetes, EC2, and Nomad using Consul.
Scale services on multiple infrastructures	Use Consul service mesh, mesh gateways, DNS, and catalog sync across multiple infrastructures.
Services with Consul client agents	Deploy services with Consul client agents on VMs using immutable infrastructure and CI/CD.
Deployment automation	Automate Consul-related delivery workflows with CI/CD, GitOps, and infrastructure tooling.