A distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure.
Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure.
Consul provides several key features:
- Multi-Datacenter - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can support any number of regions without complex configuration.
- Service Mesh - Consul Service Mesh enables secure service-to-service communication with automatic TLS encryption and identity-based authorization. Applications can use sidecar proxies in a service mesh configuration to establish TLS connections for inbound and outbound connections with Transparent Proxy.
- API Gateway - Consul API Gateway manages access to services within Consul Service Mesh, allow users to define traffic and authorization policies to services deployed within the mesh.
- Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.
- Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.
- Dynamic App Configuration - An HTTP API that allows users to store indexed objects within Consul, for storing configuration parameters and application metadata.
connect: Upgrade envoy version to 1.37.2 and newer versions [GH-23469]
go: Upgrade go version to 1.26 [GH-23493]
agent: Increased default HTTP server timeouts to prevent breaking long-polling blocking queries. read_timeout and write_timeout are now set to 15 minutes (up from 30 seconds), while read_header_timeout (10s) and idle_timeout (120s) still provide protection against Slowloris attacks. All timeouts remain configurable via the http_config block. [GH-23267]
api-gateway, terminating-gateway: Apply HTTP request path normalization on api-gateway and terminating-gateway HTTP listeners to prevent L7 intention RBAC bypass via non-normalized paths (CVE-2024-10005). [GH-23534]
docker: update ubi base image to ubi9-minimal:9.7. [GH-23553]
docker: Upgrade curl to >= 8.20.0 from Alpine edge in the container image to address
CVE-2026-6429,
CVE-2026-4873,
CVE-2026-5773,
CVE-2026-6253,
CVE-2026-6276,
CVE-2026-7168,
CVE-2026-5545.
Alpine 3.23 stable does not yet carry the patched version. [GH-23750]
docker: Update to UBI base image to 9.8 for fixing [CVE_2026-2100] [GH-23588]
FEATURES:
(Enterprise Only) update to go-licensing/v4 and go-census/v3 inorder to adapt to new licenses of PAO.
Global Rate Limiter: (Enterprise Only) a new "rate-limit" config entry kind that enables dynamic, cluster-wide RPC rate limiting stored in Raft and automatically replicated to all servers. This allows operators to apply or adjust global rate limits at runtime without restarting Consul servers — a critical capability for emergency scenarios where the cluster is under excessive load.
api-gateway: Added SDS certificate support for API Gateway listeners, including listener-level default TLS certificates and HTTP/TCP route service TLS SDS overrides. Service overrides inherit the listener SDS cluster when omitted, and gateway validation/xDS generation now rejects conflicting override mappings to keep certificate selection deterministic. [GH-23354]
api-gateway: add support for gateway-level default upstream limits and route service-level limit overrides for MaxConnections, MaxPendingRequests, and MaxConcurrentRequests. [GH-23396]
api: Added new API "/v1/internal/rpc/methods" that lists all RPC method names. Requires an operator:read ACL token. This is useful when users want to configure rate limits that exclude specific RPC endpoints. [GH-23329]
ca: (Enterprise Only) Added new Connect CA provider for Cyberark WIM (connect.ca_provider = "pan-distributed-issuer"), enabling Consul to issue certificates through Cyberark WIM.
server: (Enterprise Only) add stable cluster identity and leader-gated global registry sync for service summary publishing.
telemetry: (Enterprise Only) Product telemetry for self-managed Consul with anonymous, opt-in usage reporting.
mesh: (Enterprise Only) Introduce support for multi-port (named port) services in Consul, including the ability to specify and route traffic using port names, as well as to retrieve virtual IPs for specific service ports. It also enforces that certain advanced multi-port features are only available in Consul Enterprise, and includes new utility functions for cluster naming and ALPN protocol generation.
IMPROVEMENTS:
agent: (Enterprise Only) Add eventually-consistent background cache for Enterprise usage metrics, reducing GET /v1/operator/usage latency from O(PNK) to O(1) and lowering CPU/memory pressure during high-frequency scraping via a watch-driven maintainer goroutine.
mesh: (Enterprise Only) Introduce support for multi-port (named port) services in Consul, including the ability to specify and route traffic using port names, as well as to retrieve virtual IPs for specific service ports. It also enforces that certain advanced multi-port features are only available in Consul Enterprise, and includes new utility functions for cluster naming and ALPN protocol generation.
terminating-gateway: Updated the cluster upstream tls to use sds instead of static certs, allowing for dynamic certificate updates without needing to restart the terminating gateway. [GH-23288]
telemetry: Add certificate expiry monitoring with Prometheus metrics (labeled with datacenter/partition/namespace), structured logging with configurable severity thresholds, and enhanced Connect CA API to include NotAfter field for root and intermediate certificates. [GH-23147]
deps: Upgrade github.com/hashicorp/vault/sdk from v0.7.0 to v0.25.1 and github.com/hashicorp/vault/api from v1.12.2 to v1.16.0. [GH-23574]
test-integ: upgrade testcontainers-go (v0.22.0->v0.40.0) and docker/docker (v24.0.5->v28.5.1) in the integration test module. This removes opencontainers/runc as a Go dependency of the test framework. These are test infrastructure dependencies only and have no impact on the consul binary or any consul deployment. [GH-23573]
xds: (Enterprise Only) add Consecutive5xx, ConsecutiveGatewayFailure, and EnforcingConsecutiveGatewayFailure fields to PassiveHealthCheck, allowing operators to configure Envoy outlier detection thresholds for 5xx responses and gateway failures (502/503/504) on upstreams defaults.
BUG FIXES:
audit-logging: (Enterprise Only) Fixed JSON unmarshall error when array of obj is passed for auditReq body.
cli: Enhanced error messages in consul config write command to provide actionable guidance when config entries cannot be modified due to references by gateways or routers. [GH-22921]
xds: Fixed XDS package to generate correct endpoints and cluster configurations for API Gateways when peered, and updated the API Gateway update handler to propogate mesh gateway config to its upstreams. [GH-23454]
XDS: Fixes issue with mesh-gateway in remote mode on AWS EKS, as DNS hostnames are assigned to AWS NLBs instead of IPs and envoy's EDS endpoint validation expects address to be an IP. Now EDS load assignment is skipped for non-peer remote mesh gateway targets with hostname based gateways keeping CDS/EDS in sync. [GH-23543]
api-gateway: resolve service subsets for routes during API gateway discovery chain synthesis. [GH-23294]
