HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Consul is a managed service mesh that provides discovery and security capabilities for services running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's designed to help organizations manage their infrastructure, secure their services, and connect them across cloud providers. HCP Consul is different from AWS in that it doesn't provide infrastructure for running applications, but rather allows users to leverage HashiCorp tools to manage any infrastructure. The platform provides a dedicated virtual private cloud (VPC) called the HashiCorp Virtual Network (HVN), which must be peered with an active VPC to deploy HCP Consul. HCP Consul also provides identity access management (IAM) roles and is designed to work across multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It offers service discovery, load balancing, and DNS resolution capabilities, as well as a service mesh that facilitates secure connections between services. Users can use HCP Consul for simple example use cases such as tracking IP addresses of applications or automating networking for newly provisioned services, and it's designed to work with existing cloud-provider-specific tools like AWS App Mesh.