[consul] Consul 1.8.0 Released!

[Mike Morris]

Hello Everyone, 

We are excited to announce the general availability of Consul 1.8.0.

 

Below are a few of the major new features in Consul 1.8:

• WAN Federation over Mesh Gateways

Allows Consul datacenters to federate by forwarding WAN gossip and RPC traffic through Mesh Gateways rather than requiring the servers to be exposed to the WAN directly. Get hands on experience deploying a mesh gateway on Kubernetes with the HashiCorp Learn tutorial  

• Ingress Gateways

Allows external service traffic to enter the mesh to enable incremental adoption and transition services into the mesh without disrupting existing infrastructure. Ingress gateways are also shown in the Consul UI.  Get hands on experience deploying an ingress gateway with the HashiCorp Learn tutorial. 

• Terminating Gateways

Allows discovery and connection to services outside the mesh which do not have sidecar proxies deployed (such as legacy applications or managed databases) by terminating mTLS connections, enforcing intentions for authorization, and forwarding requests to the appropriate destination. Terminating gateways are also shown in the Consul UI. Get hands on experience deploying a terminating gateway with the HashiCorp Learn tutorial.

• JSON Web Token (JWT) Auth Method

Allows exchanging a signed JWT from a trusted external identity provider for a Consul ACL token.

• Single Sign-On (SSO) [Enterprise]

Lets an operator configure Consul to use an external OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider to automatically handle the lifecycle of creating, distributing and managing ACL tokens for performing CLI operations or accessing the UI.

• Audit Logging [Enterprise]

Adds instrumentation to record a trail of events (both attempted and authorized) by users of Consul’s HTTP API for purposes of regulatory compliance.

 

This release also includes bug fixes and several enhancements:

• Support for configuring Envoy Load Balancing with Consul Service Mesh

• Filtering support in the v1/connect/intentions endpoint. 

• Support for configuring passive health checks
  

We are also excited to announce Helm Support for Ingress, Terminating and WAN Federation via Mesh Gateways, to enable usage of these features within Kubernetes.

High-level description is available on the announcement blog post.  The full list of changes may be found in the changelog.

Links:

• Changelog - https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/v1.8.0/CHANGELOG.md

• Binaries - https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul/1.8.0/

• Blog - https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-hashicorp-consul-1-8

• Consul Helm Chart - https://hub.helm.sh/charts/hashicorp/consul

 

Thank you to our active community members who have been invaluable in adding new features, reporting bugs, and improving the documentation for Consul in this release!

 

Thanks,

Consul Team