Consul Enterprise

Consul Enterprise features address the organizational complexities of collaboration, operations, scale, and governance. If you have purchased or wish to try out Consul Enterprise, refer to how to access Consul Enterprise.

Enterprise features

The following features are available in several forms of Consul Enterprise.

Multi-Tenancy

Admin Partitions: Define administrative boundaries between tenants within a single Consul datacenter
Namespaces: Define resource boundaries within a single admin partition for further organizational flexibility
Sameness Groups: Define partitions and cluster peers as members of a group with identical services

Resiliency

Automated Backups: Configure the automatic backup of Consul state
Redundancy Zones: Deploy backup voting Consul servers to efficiently improve Consul fault tolerance
Server request rate limits per source IP: Limit gRPC and RPC traffic to servers for source IP addresses.

Scalability

Read Replicas: Deploy non-voting Consul servers to enhance the scalability of read requests

Operational simplification

Automated Upgrades: Ease upgrades by automating the transition from existing to newly deployed Consul servers
Consul-Terraform-Sync Enterprise: Leverage the enhanced network infrastructure automation capabilities of the enterprise version of Consul-Terraform-Sync

Complex network topology support

Network Areas: Support complex network topologies between federated Consul datacenters with pairwise federation rather than full mesh federation
Network Segments: Support complex network topologies within a Consul datacenter by enforcing boundaries in Consul client gossip traffic

Governance

OIDC Auth Method: Manage user access to Consul through an OIDC identity provider instead of Consul ACL tokens directly
Audit Logging: Understand Consul access and usage patterns by reviewing access to the Consul HTTP API

Regulatory compliance

FIPS 140-2 Compliance: Leverage FIPS builds of Consul Enterprise to ensure your Consul deployments are secured with BoringCrypto and CNGCrypto, and compliant with FIPS 140-2.
Note
FIPS 140-2 builds of Consul Enterprise support all runtimes (VMs, Kubernetes) except for Lambda and ECS. In addition, HCP does not currently support FIPS builds of Consul Enterprise.

Access Consul Enterprise

The method of accessing Consul Enterprise and its features depends on the whether using HashiCorp Cloud Platform or self-managed Consul.

HCP Consul

No action is required to access Consul Enterprise in a HashiCorp Cloud Platform installation.

You can try out HCP Consul for free. Refer to the HCP Consul product page for more details.

Self-Managed Consul

To access Consul Enterprise in a self-managed installation, apply a purchased license to the Consul Enterprise binary that grants access to the desired features.

Contact your HashiCorp Support contact for a development license.

Consul Enterprise feature availability

The Consul Enterprise features that are available depend on your license and the runtimes you use in your deployment.

Feature availability by license

Available Enterprise features per Consul form and license include:

Feature	HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Consul	Consul Enterprise	Legacy Consul Enterprise (module-based)
Consul servers as a managed service	Yes	No (self-managed)	No (self-managed)
Admin Partitions	All tiers	Yes	With Governance and Policy module
Audit Logging	Standard tier and above	Yes	With Governance and Policy module
Automated Server Backups	All tiers	Yes	Yes
Automated Server Upgrades	All tiers	Yes	Yes
Consul-Terraform-Sync Enterprise	All tiers	Yes	Yes
Enhanced Read Scalability	No	Yes	With Global Visibility, Routing, and Scale module
FIPS 140-2 Compliance	No	Yes	No
Namespaces	All tiers	Yes	With Governance and Policy module
Network Areas	No	Yes	With Global Visibility, Routing, and Scale module
Network Segments	No	Yes	With Global Visibility, Routing, and Scale module
OIDC Auth Method	No	Yes	Yes
Redundancy Zones	Not applicable	Yes	With Global Visibility, Routing, and Scale module
Sameness Groups	No	Yes	N/A
Server request rate limits per source IP	All tiers	Yes	With Governance and Policy module

Feature availability by runtime

Consul Enterprise feature availability can change depending on your server and client agent runtimes.

Enterprise Feature	VM Client	K8s Client	ECS Client
Admin Partitions	✅	✅	✅
Audit Logging	✅	✅	✅
Automated Server Backups	✅	✅	✅
Automated Server Upgrades	✅	✅	✅
Enhanced Read Scalability	✅	✅	✅
FIPS 140-2 Compliance	✅	✅	❌
Namespaces	✅	✅	✅
Network Areas	✅	✅	✅
Network Segments	✅	✅	❌
OIDC Auth Method	✅	✅	✅
Redundancy Zones	✅	✅	✅
Sameness Groups	✅	✅	✅
Server request rate limits per source IP	✅	✅	✅

Enterprise Feature	VM Client	K8s Client	ECS Client
Admin Partitions	✅	✅	✅
Audit Logging	✅	✅	✅
Automated Server Backups	✅	✅	✅
Automated Server Upgrades	❌	❌	❌
Enhanced Read Scalability	❌	❌	❌
FIPS 140-2 Compliance	✅	✅	❌
Namespaces	✅	✅	✅
Network Areas	✅	✅	✅
Network Segments	✅	✅	❌
OIDC Auth Method	✅	✅	✅
Redundancy Zones	❌	❌	❌
Sameness Groups	✅	✅	✅
Server request rate limits per source IP	✅	✅	✅

Enterprise Feature	VM Client	K8s Client	ECS Client
Admin Partitions	✅	✅	✅
Audit Logging	✅	✅	✅
Automated Server Backups	✅	✅	✅
Automated Server Upgrades	✅	✅	✅
Enhanced Read Scalability	❌	❌	❌
FIPS 140-2 Compliance	❌	❌	❌
Namespaces	✅	✅	✅
Network Areas	❌	❌	❌
Network Segments	❌	❌	❌
OIDC Auth Method	❌	❌	❌
Redundancy Zones	n/a	n/a	n/a
Sameness Groups	✅	✅	✅
Server request rate limits per source IP	✅	✅	✅