Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation

Enterprise

This feature requires Consul Enterprise with the Global Visibility, Routing, and Scale module.

Consul’s core federation capability uses the same gossip mechanism that is used for a single datacenter. This requires that every server from every datacenter be in a fully connected mesh with an open gossip port (8302/tcp and 8302/udp) and an open server RPC port (8300/tcp). For organizations with large numbers of datacenters, it becomes difficult to support a fully connected mesh. It is often desirable to have topologies like hub-and-spoke with central management datacenters and “spoke” datacenters that can’t interact with each other.

Consul Enterprise offers a network area mechanism that allows operators to federate Consul datacenters together on a pairwise basis, enabling partially-connected network topologies. Once a link is created, Consul agents can make queries to the remote datacenter in service of both API and DNS requests for remote resources (in spite of the partially-connected nature of the topology as a whole). Consul datacenters can simultaneously participate in both network areas and the existing WAN pool, which eases migration.