The latest version of Consul, 1.17 beta, introduces several significant enhancements for simplified workflow management, reliability, scale, and security in service networking. HCP Consul Central adds global visibility and control to the platform, allowing users to centralize their Consul deployments and gain a unified view of their clusters. The new APIs simplify workflow management by enabling multi-port services and flexible routing, while also introducing locality-aware routing for low-latency connections and JWT-based authentication and authorization support for API Gateway. Additionally, Consul 1.17 bolsters reliability with sameness groups and rate limiting for services, making it easier to manage and scale Consul deployments in private networking environments. The platform is designed to be deployed in datacenters or public cloud regions, where requests are routed by the downstream proxy to any healthy and available upstream instance within the same region. With these enhancements, Consul empowers organizations to build resilient and efficient applications in distributed environments, enabling a consistent, enterprise-ready control plane to discover and securely connect any application.