Consul 1.21 improves service discovery, Consul on Kubernetes, and supports OpenShift 4.17

HashiCorp has released Consul 1.21 with several key improvements, including simplified service discovery for external services through the use of Consul External Monitoring Service (ESM), which no longer requires a separate Consul agent. This new architecture makes it easier to deploy and manage Consul ESM for service discovery of external services. Additionally, Consul on Kubernetes has been improved with support for sending snapshots to Google Cloud Storage, reducing the burden on operators to manually copy backups. The release also includes full support for OpenShift 4.16 and 4.17, as well as support for Kubernetes Pod Security Admissions, which replaces PodSecurityPolicies. Furthermore, a reorganized Consul documentation structure has been introduced to better serve platform engineers, application developers, and security engineers.