Consul: Up and Running: Service Mesh for Any Runtime or Cloud

With the advent of microservices, Kubernetes, public cloud, and hybrid computing, site reliability and DevOps engineers are facing more complexity than ever before. Service mesh is an exciting new technology that promises to help tackle this complexity. A service mesh provides you with a unified control plane to manage the networking among your applications running on these distinct platforms. This definitive guide shows you how to automate networking for simple and secure application delivery with Consul.

Author Luke Kysow, Consul engineer at HashiCorp, demonstrates how this service mesh solution provides a software-driven approach to security, observability, and traffic management. Once you learn how to implement zero-trust networking by deploying Consul on multiple platforms, you'll be able to take control of application traffic, prevent outages, view metrics, integrate with legacy systems, and more.

• Dive into the characteristics of service meshes, zero-trust networking, and traffic-shaping patterns
• Deploy Consul on Kubernetes and virtual machines
• Learn how to secure, monitor, and manage your application traffic with Consul
• Use this guide to deploy and operate applications as a system administrator, DevOps engineer, or developer

From the Preface

Consul is a fully featured service mesh from HashiCorp, the company that also created Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Packer, and Vagrant. A small operations team can leverage Consul to impact security, reliability, observability, and application delivery across their entire stack—all without requiring developers to modify their underlying microservices.

In this book, you’ll learn to install, configure, and operate Consul in order to tame complexity and take back control of your infrastructure. I’m excited for you to start on your service mesh journey with Consul—let’s dig in and get up and running!

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re a platform or operations engineer tasked with maintaining a growing microservices environment on Kubernetes or VMs, then this book is for you. If you’re a microservices developer interested in increasing reliability or experimenting with advanced deployment strategies such as blue/green and canarying, this book is also for you. Or perhaps your organization is already using Consul and you’re looking to learn how it works at a deeper level and how to utilize it better.

This book will also be helpful for security engineers and higher-level decision-makers (managers, directors, VPs of engineering, and CTOs) to provide an overview of the concepts behind a service mesh and the value it provides.

This book assumes general knowledge of microservices development and networking concepts such as load balancers. It contains instructions for installing Consul on Kubernetes or Linux VMs and assumes that you will be familiar with one of those platforms. It contains exercises that you can complete on Windows, macOS, or Linux machines.

What Is Not in This Book

This book does not cover Consul features unrelated to its service mesh functionality. For example, Consul’s key/value store and Domain Name System (DNS) service discovery are not covered. Also, this book is not a detailed production-ready operations guide to Consul. The aim is to familiarize readers with Consul’s concepts and get them “up and running” with its functionality.

Navigating This Book

The book starts with service mesh fundamentals: what a service mesh is and how it works. Next, you’ll learn what makes Consul unique, its architecture, and the specific protocols it uses. With that groundwork in place, you’ll be ready to deploy Consul onto Kubernetes or VMs and add your services into the service mesh.

You’ll then learn to use Consul to secure your systems with zero trust networking, add observability, increase reliability, and control traffic. In the final chapter, I cover advanced topics such as multi-cluster deployment.

Throughout the book, I include exercises for both Kubernetes and VMs, so you can utilize these concepts with an actual microservices application. If you wish to follow along with the exercises, I recommend you complete the chapters in order since they often rely on one another.

隨著微服務、Kubernetes、公有雲和混合計算的出現，網站可靠性和DevOps工程師面臨著比以往更複雜的挑戰。服務網格是一種令人興奮的新技術，承諾幫助應對這種複雜性。服務網格為您提供統一的控制平面，用於管理在這些不同平台上運行的應用程序之間的網絡。本權威指南向您展示如何使用Consul自動化簡單且安全的應用程序交付的網絡。

作者Luke Kysow是HashiCorp的Consul工程師，他展示了這種服務網格解決方案如何提供軟件驅動的安全性、可觀察性和流量管理方法。一旦您學會了如何通過在多個平台上部署Consul來實現零信任網絡，您將能夠控制應用程序流量，防止故障，查看指標，與遺留系統集成等等。

- 深入了解服務網格、零信任網絡和流量塑形模式的特性
- 在Kubernetes和虛擬機上部署Consul
- 學習如何使用Consul保護、監控和管理應用程序流量
- 作為系統管理員、DevOps工程師或開發人員，使用本指南來部署和運營應用程序

從前言中可以得知，Consul是HashiCorp開發的一個功能完整的服務網格，該公司還創建了Terraform、Vault、Nomad、Packer和Vagrant。一個小型運營團隊可以利用Consul來影響整個堆棧的安全性、可靠性、可觀察性和應用程序交付，而無需開發人員修改其底層的微服務。

在本書中，您將學習安裝、配置和操作Consul，以應對複雜性並重新掌控基礎設施。我很期待您能開始使用Consul進行服務網格之旅-讓我們開始吧！

適合閱讀本書的讀者包括平台或運營工程師，他們負責在Kubernetes或虛擬機上維護不斷增長的微服務環境。如果您是一個微服務開發人員，有興趣提高可靠性或嘗試高級部署策略（如藍/綠部署和金絲雀部署），那麼本書也適合您。或者，如果您的組織已經在使用Consul，並且您希望更深入地了解它的工作原理以及如何更好地利用它，本書也將對您有所幫助。

本書假設讀者具有微服務開發和網絡概念（如負載均衡器）的一般知識。它包含在Kubernetes或Linux虛擬機上安裝Consul的指令，並假設您將熟悉其中一個平台。它包含可以在Windows、macOS或Linux機器上完成的練習。

本書不涵蓋與Consul服務網格功能無關的其他Consul功能。例如，不涵蓋Consul的鍵/值存儲和域名系統（DNS）服務發現。此外，本書也不是一本關於Consul詳細的生產就緒操作指南。它的目的是讓讀者熟悉Consul的概念並讓他們能夠使用其功能。

本書的導航方式如下：首先介紹服務網格的基礎知識：服務網格是什麼以及它是如何工作的。接下來，您將了解Consul的獨特之處、其架構以及具體使用的協議。有了這些基礎，您將準備好在Kubernetes或虛擬機上部署Consul並添加您的服務。