Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Enterprise service networking with HashiCorp Consul and AWS (PRT238)

Summary

• The session covered the business value of HashiCorp Consul, focusing on four use case pillars: discover, secure, automate, and access.
• An in-depth explanation of service mesh was provided, including how it works and its benefits.
• Comcast's use of Consul was discussed, highlighting their network architecture and the problems they aimed to solve with Consul.
• A demo application called HashiCups was presented, showcasing Consul running across multiple runtimes and AWS regions.
• The benefits of using Consul's service mesh were demonstrated, including security, observability, and traffic control.
• The session concluded with a summary of the topics covered and an invitation to learn more about Consul through their website and GitHub repository.

Insights

• Consul acts as a centralized source of truth for services, providing service discovery and health monitoring across different environments and runtimes.
• The service mesh offers secure connectivity through mutual TLS, consistent security policies based on service identity, and governance through centralized policy management and audit logs.
• Network infrastructure automation tools like Consul Terraform Sync automate processes such as updating load balancers and firewall rules, reducing manual work and potential errors.
• API gateways integrated with Consul can establish mutual TLS connections and enforce access control, simplifying traffic management.
• Comcast's implementation of Consul demonstrates the scalability and flexibility of the tool in a large enterprise environment, addressing challenges like multi-regional failover and network complexity reduction.
• The HashiCups demo application illustrated how Consul can manage services across Kubernetes, ECS, EC2, and Lambda, maintaining seamless communication and failover capabilities.
• Consul's open-source nature and extensive documentation make it accessible for companies looking to adopt or learn more about service mesh and network automation.