HashiCorp has released Consul 1.17, a significant update to its service networking solution that enhances unified workflow management, reliability, scale, and security for service networking. The new release introduces locality-aware routing for low-latency connections and JWT-based authentication and authorization support for API Gateway. Consul 1.17 also bolsters reliability with sameness groups and rate limiting for services, simplifying operations and increasing service availability for multi-cluster or multi-region deployments. Additionally, the update includes a new set of APIs for interacting with the catalog, authenticating traffic using workload identities, and managing Consul service mesh, which are now exposed under the new v2 API paths. The release aims to enable a consistent, enterprise-ready control plane to discover and securely connect any application, empowering organizations to build resilient and efficient applications in distributed environments.