Deploy Consul Dataplane with HCP Consul

Consul Dataplane is a lightweight process for managing Envoy proxies. As of Consul v1.14.0, Kubernetes deployments use Consul dataplanes instead of client agents. Consul Dataplane removes the need to run client agents on every node in a cluster by deploying sidecar proxies.

Consul Dataplane requires servers running Consul v1.14.0+ and Consul K8s v1.0.0+.

For more information on Consul Dataplane, including architecture, features, and constaints, refer to Simplified Service Mesh with Consul Dataplane in our Consul documentation.

Installation

To install Consul Dataplane, set VERSION to 1.0.0 and then follow the instructions to install a specific version of Consul with the Helm Chart or with the Consul-k8s CLI.

Helm

$ export VERSION=1.0.0 &&\
    helm install consul hashicorp/consul --set global.name=consul --version ${VERSION} --create-namespace --namespace consul

Consul-k8s CLI

$ export VERSION=1.0.0 && \
    curl --location "https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul-k8s/${VERSION}/consul-k8s_${VERSION}_darwin_amd64.zip" --output consul-k8s-cli.zip

Upgrading

Before you upgrade Consul to a version that uses Consul Dataplane, you must edit your Helm chart so that client agents are removed from your deployments. Refer to upgrading to Consul Dataplane for more information.

Tutorials

Consul Dataplane is supported on Kubernetes deployments. To learn more about using Kubernetes with HCP Consul, refer to the following tutorials: