HashiCorp Consul 1.16 introduces new features for reliability, scalability, security, service mesh UX, extensibility, and service discovery, including sameness groups for seamless service failover between clusters, enhanced control plane protection with per-IP rate limits, FIPS 140-2 compliant builds, JWT auth for service-to-service traffic, transparent proxy mode for failover and virtual services, permissive mTLS, simplified API Gateway installation on Kubernetes, and extensions for Envoy such as external AuthZ, property override, Wasm, and improved service discovery with catalog sync support for health checks and ingress resources. These updates aim to enhance enterprise readiness, simplify the user experience, speed app deployments, and bolster application security in a mesh.