Consul upgrade from 7.5 CE to latest version

We are currently running Consul 0.7.5 Community Edition, which is very outdated, including in production. Due to the significant version gap and the associated blast radius, an in-place upgrade is not recommended.

The safest and recommended approach is to deploy a new Consul cluster on the latest version and migrate services and clients gradually, minimizing risk to production workloads.

There are two possible approaches:

  1. Set up a new Consul infrastructure with the latest version.
  2. Perform a gradual in-place upgrade, but given that we are 28 versions behind, this option carries higher risk.

Considering the version gap and associated risk, I am inclined toward approach #1.

If someone has faced similar problem in past, please reply.
Also hope Enterprise support of consul can help if we take the help from Consul enterprise support