HashiCorp Consul AI Skill Guide (Claude)

Overview & Engine Architecture

Consul provides service discovery, health checking, a hierarchical KV store, and optional Connect service mesh (mTLS + intentions). Servers form a Raft quorum; client agents on nodes register services and answer DNS (*.service.consul) / HTTP catalog queries. In any shared environment treat ACLs as mandatory—bootstrap once, store the management token offline, issue least-privilege tokens to agents and sidecars. Put secrets in @vault, not Consul KV.