HashiCorp Announces New HashiCorp Consul Service on Microsoft Azure in Collaboration With Microsoft

SEATTLE, Sept. 10, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today onstage at HashiConf, HashiCorp, a leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software, announced the HashiCorp Consul Service (HCS) on Microsoft Azure in collaboration with Microsoft. The service will enable customers to natively provision highly available HashiCorp-managed Consul clusters in their Azure environments. With this service, customers gain the benefits of running Consul for service networking and as a service mesh without the operational overhead of running and maintaining Consul clusters themselves.

HashiCorp Consul is one of the leading multi-cloud service networking platforms to connect, secure, and configure services across any runtime platform or public cloud provider. Thousands of organizations use Consul in production to unlock the cloud operating model for networking. Consul helps them shift from static, IP-based networking to dynamic, identity-based networking, with many running tens of thousands of nodes of Consul in their environments. The announcement builds on the momentum of the multi-year collaboration between HashiCorp and Microsoft. Earlier this year, HashiCorp won the 2019 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Open Source Applications and Infrastructure on Azure.

“HashiCorp Consul provides critical functionality to users for service discovery and service mesh across any runtime platform or cloud provider. Our customers told us they wanted an easier and more secure way to adopt Consul,” said Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp. “Now, with HashiCorp Consul Service on Microsoft Azure and our close collaboration with Microsoft, joint customers will be able to leave the operational work to us and focus on their core business instead.”

“Our open source partners like HashiCorp are building technology to solve some of our customers’ most important problems,” said Erin Chapple, corporate vice president of Azure compute at Microsoft Corp. “This is why we are partnering with HashiCorp to bring proven technology, HashiCorp’s Consul, to Azure as a consumable cloud service. This collaboration will streamline adoption of key capabilities like a service registry and service mesh, which are increasingly important to many enterprises.”

HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure benefits from the Azure Managed Applications platform, allowing Azure customers to provision their cluster using the Azure Portal or Resource Manager Templates. The cluster is then managed, monitored, and kept up-to-date on an on-going basis by the HashiCorp Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. This will allow joint customers to focus resources on integrating Consul into their operational architectures rather than having to worry about backups, upgrades, or implementing the operational best practices for their cluster.

HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure lowers the barrier to entry for Azure customers to enable the key Consul capabilities:

• Service discovery: Providing a service registry with integrated health checking to enable any service to discover and be discovered by other services
• Service mesh: Simplifying networking by shifting network functionality from centralized middleware to the end points. Consul’s service mesh functions include:
  °  Dynamic traffic management: Enabling advanced traffic management to support different deployment strategies and improve application resiliency
  °  Service segmentation: Enforcing security poicies for specific services across heterogeneous environments
  
  
  
  
  °  Observability: Enabling networking metric collection to provide insights into application behavior and performance without code modifications
  °  Mesh gateway: Routing traffic transparently and securely between different clouds or data centers

To use the service, a customer will subscribe to the HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure through the Azure Marketplace. HCS on Azure will then automatically provision a highly available Consul cluster configured optimally for Azure. The service will expose the necessary endpoints and ports to enable connectivity to the cluster from client applications. The integration also preserves the ability for customers to use the Azure Active Directory system for identity and their existing Azure billing account for payment.

Availability
HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure is currently in private beta. See the announcement blog post for a more detailed walkthrough of the integration here: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-consul-service-on-azure. See the HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure web page for a high-level overview of the service and to sign up for status updates: https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul/service-on-azure. 

For more about this announcement and related efforts from Microsoft, see the blog from Brendan Burns, distinguished engineer at Microsoft, here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-cloud-native-applications-with-azure-and-hashicorp/.

To learn more about Consul, visit: https://www.consul.io/. To learn more about Microsoft Azure, visit the Azure home page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/.

More Resources
More information about Consul, multi-cloud service networking, and service mesh is available in the HashiCorp Resource Library, including:

• Webinar -- “Layer 7 Observability and Centralized Configuration with Consul Service Mesh”: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/layer-7-observability-centralized-configuration-consul-service-mesh
• Video -- “The Cloud Operating Model: DevOps, Security, and Networking Challenges & Solutions”: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/cloud-operating-model-devops-security-networking-challenges 
• White paper -- “Unlocking the Cloud Operating Model: Networking”: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/unlocking-the-cloud-operating-model-networking
• HashiConf EU 2019 session -- “Multi-Cloud Service Networking for Humans”: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/multi-cloud-service-mesh-networking-for-humans

About HashiConf
HashiConf is HashiCorp’s fifth annual flagship community conference, taking place Sept. 9 through 11 at the Hyatt Regency in Seattle. The sold-out conference is expecting more than 1,600 attendees, and features technical sessions, in-depth trainings, product releases, and direct access to HashiCorp experts. The conference will have speakers from organizations including 24 Hour Fitness, Accenture, ActBlue, AHEAD, AWS, Anaplan, Apptio, Bench, Comcast, Criteo, Datadog, GitLab, Google Cloud, Jet.com, KLAS Telecom, Kong, Microsoft Azure, Petco, Sky Betting & Gaming, Solo.io, Starbucks, State Farm, Sylabs, and Sysdig. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and VMware are sponsors of HashiConf this year, along with 22 other partner organizations. For more information, go to: https://www.hashiconf.com.

About HashiCorp
HashiCorp is the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. The HashiCorp software suite enables organizations to adopt consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. HashiCorp open source products Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad are downloaded tens of millions of times each year and are broadly adopted by the Global 2000. Enterprise versions of these products enhance the open source versions with features that promote collaboration, operations, governance, and multi-data center functionality. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Mayfield, GGV Capital, Redpoint Ventures, True Ventures, IVP, and Bessemer Venture Partners. For more information, visit https://www.hashicorp.com or follow HashiCorp on Twitter @HashiCorp.

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Amber Rowland
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+1-650-814-4560

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