Consul is a distributed service mesh from HashiCorp. Its first release was in April 2014. Consul provides a single GO binary for server and client side service mesh capabilities that need to be managed, including services, configurations, certificate management, and many more. We can install Consul in the Kubernetes platform as well as directly on each machine. This open source project is available at https://github.com/hashicorp/consul.

Consul has a distributed control plane, unlike Istio and Linkerd 2.x. Consul comes with the connect feature for Kubernetes clusters. Consul is designed to work in bare-metal environments, VMs, and now with the Kubernetes environment as well. It's is an open source service discovery tool that provides service discovery APIs. The Pilot adapter in Istio can be configured to use Consul service discovery data and use a proxy to route the traffic and monitor applications. Consul 1.6 started to use the Envoy sidecar proxy for Kubernetes environments and is providing service mesh features for cloud-native applications, along with integration to monolithic applications running in legacy environments.