HashiCorp Consul

Consul is a service networking product from HashiCorp providing service discovery, service mesh, identity-based authorisation, Layer 7 traffic management and encrypted service-to-service communication across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It provides a control plane for registering, accessing and securing services, deploys gateways and sidecar proxies into the data plane, and ships in Community and Enterprise editions.

The catalog is the piece everything else depends on. A registry that tracks every service and where it currently runs is what allows the rest of the system to route, secure and observe traffic, and it is why the same product serves both plain service discovery and full service mesh use.

Consistency is handled by two protocols with different jobs, which is worth understanding before operating it. Raft gives a quorum of servers an agreed state before any change is committed, while Serf gossip manages membership across datacentres and wide-area federations. The first protects correctness and the second scales membership, and confusing them makes failure behaviour hard to reason about.

Working across runtimes rather than only Kubernetes is the practical differentiator. Organisations that still run virtual machines alongside containers can register both in one catalog, which is precisely the situation most enterprises are actually in.