Hashicorp's collection of tools, such as Terraform (provisioning), Vault (Security), Consul (networking), and Nomad (Development), are alternatives to the Kubernetes orchestration. Consul can work natively using these Hashicorp tools.

Consul has provided a service sync-up between the Kubernetes Service Catalog and Consul since September 2018 to provide a cross-platform service discovery. It also migrates service workloads in and out of Kubernetes with Consul. The service sync-up feature can be enabled either through configuration files or through the Helm chart for Consul installation in a Kubernetes environment. Once enabled, the Consul catalog will sync with microservices deployed on Kubernetes, and it doesn't require any changes to be made to its resource definitions. This process can confirm that the Consul catalog will have the latest state of the Kubernetes cluster for its service definitions.

This concludes a brief introduction to the Consul control and data planes. Please refer to https://consul.io/docs for up-to-date and detailed information.

A service mesh is incomplete without observability features. We need these due to the challenges of the distributed microservices architecture, especially for testing and debugging. Next, we will cover monitoring and visualization support in Consul.