[consul] ANN: Consul 1.8.0 beta1 Released

Consul
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Hello Everyone,

We are excited to announce the first beta release for Consul 1.8.0.

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 1.8:

  • 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. Learn more about how to use this functionality here

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

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-beta1/CHANGELOG.md

Binaries - https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul/1.8.0-beta1/

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

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 1.8 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

1 Like
3

In the 1.8.0-beta1 release there is a bug in a UI query to the /connect/intentions endpoint that leads to some service pages not being rendered.

Service pages in the UI for services with non-alphanumeric characters will not render. They instead show a page that says The backend responded with an error and Error 500 .

The workaround for this while testing with 1.8.0-beta1 is to only register services with alphanumeric characters or underscores _ in the name.

The fix has already been merged in #7888 and will be available in 1.8.0-beta2 shortly.

Best,

Freddy