Consul 1.10 Beta1 Released!

Consul
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Hello Everyone,

We are excited to announce the first beta release for Consul 1.10.0.

NOTE This beta release does not have a forward compatibility guarantee and certain functionality may change that will be incompatible with the General Availability release. Please only use the beta releases to test functionality and upgrades with clusters that can be lost.

Below are a few of the major new features in Consul 1.10:

  • Transparent proxying (docs)

Consul 1.10 adds support for transparently intercepting and redirecting traffic to sidecar proxies in the service mesh on VMs and Kubernetes. This allows applications to be migrated and deployed into the service mesh without modification.

  • Support for xDS v3

Consul 1.10 defaults to using xDS version 3 when configuring Envoy proxies newer than version 1.15. xDS v2 was deprecated in Envoy 1.17. Consul will fallback to using xDS v2 for older versions.

  • Streaming enabled by default for service health

A major architectural enhancement in how update notifications for blocking queries are delivered within the cluster which was introduced in Consul 1.9. Streaming results in very significant reduction of CPU and network bandwidth usage on Consul servers in large scale deployments. Streaming is now available for the service health HTTP endpoint. As of Consul 1.10, streaming is now enabled by default. Once we have feedback from more users who have tried it, we hope streaming will become the only mechanism for delivering blocking query updates internally.

  • Re-designed Consul UI with Sidebar layout

The Consul UI has been redesigned to use a sidebar layout. The new sidebar makes it easier to navigate the Consul UI, while its ability to be collapsed allows for maximization of the workspace.

This release also has a few major enhancements to our Kubernetes integration:

  • Out of the box Prometheus and Grafana deployment with Consul Kubernetes (docs)

Consul K8s now provides a way to deploy Prometheus and Grafana with Consul K8s via the Consul Helm chart. It also automatically integrates Prometheus with Consul’s Service Visualization UI to display metrics for traffic between services. Consul Agent and Consul Gateway metrics can also be enabled via Helm to be scraped by Prometheus and queried within Grafana.

  • Metrics merging for scraping metrics from Envoy and Pod workloads (docs)

With Kubernetes annotations, you are now able to expose both pod and envoy metrics via a single endpoint for Prometheus to scrape metrics. Previously, you needed to choose between either Envoy or Pod metrics since Prometheus annotations only allow you to scrape from a single pod within a container on Kubernetes.

See the announcement blog post for more info. The full list of changes may be found in the changelog.

Links:

We encourage you to experiment with these new features, but recommend against using this build in a production environment. Depending on feedback and resolving outstanding issues, we may release further betas or release candidates, and will publish a final, generally available 1.10 release when appropriate.

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

2 Likes
3

Where is the button to switch between dark and light mode? Or is it dark mode only?

4

Hi @Wolfsrudel sorry that was an incorrect statement, unfortunately dark mode is not available yet in the Consul UI.

5

OK, I see, but the sidebar is in dark mode already. :slight_smile: That’s why I am asking. :slight_smile:

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It is in a dark color scheme you are right, which we did update as part of the UI redesign. However proper dark mode support is not available yet and we have not targeted that for 1.10.