The New Stack Makers

In this episode of The New Stack Makers from KubeCon EU 2023, Rob Barnes, a senior developer advocate at HashiCorp, discusses how their networking service, Consul, allows users to incorporate containers or virtual machines into their workflows without imposing container usage. Consul, an early implementation of service mesh technology, offers a full-featured control plane with service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionalities. It supports various environments, including traditional applications, VMs, containers, and orchestration engines like Nomad and Kubernetes.Barnes explains that Consul can dictate which services can communicate with each other based on rules. By leveraging these capabilities, HashiCorp aims to make users' lives easier and software more secure.Barnes emphasizes that there are misconceptions about service mesh, with some assuming it is exclusively tied to container usage. He clarifies that service mesh adoption should be flexible and meet users wherever they are in their t