Consul Connect Intentions replication using consul-replicate about consul-replicate

[mkeeler]

@nitsh Consul 1.6 will bring intention replication into Consul itself. So what is the use case on having it be in consul-replicate vs just being a part of Consul.

[nitsh]

Oh okay. Didn't realize that.

The use case could be to support the older versions who are not ready to upgrade but I'm not sure if that's a good enough reason.

[princepathria97]

@mkeeler If I'm using open source version of Consul, then I have to use consul replicate for multi DC. Right?

[mkeeler]

@princepathria97 Prior to Consul 1.6 the OSS version of Consul did not support Connect/Intentions between multiple datacenters. Consul 1.6 (which we released our first release candidate of earlier this week) includes support for Connect across datacenters as well as intention replication. So if you are on a version of Consul prior to 1.6 which is likely as we haven't published the final GA build yet, then Connect with multiple datacenters is only supported in the enterprise version of Consul. You could attempt to replicate intentions in the OSS version with consul-replicate but thats really a very small portion of portion of allowing Connect to work and probably wont get you very far. I would say to checkout the 1.6 release candidate (in a non-prod environment) or wait until the final 1.6.0 release which should be coming very soon.

[macgahe]

@mkeeler I do have a slightly different use case where I do not need to replicate Consul connect intentions but instead i will use Consul as the back-end storage for my Vault servers and I just want to replicate the KV. is there any feature in Consul which does this natively or should I still use consul-replicate to replicate the KV stored?

Thanks