HashiCorp Consul Ingress Gateways and L7 Traffic Management in Kubernetes

Consul's Ingress gateways and Terminating gateways are incredibly useful for integrating workloads that are not service mesh enabled, allowing traffic to safely enter and exit the mesh while enforcing mTLS and network policies. Consul's L7 traffic management features enable advanced rollout methods like canary testing and blue-green deployments through HTTP path-based traffic routing, traffic shifting, and traffic splitting. These features leverage a 3-stage process to resolve upstream services, applying logic at the proxy/Consul layer for resolution, splitting, and routing. Consul provides service discovery, automatic service-to-service encryption, identity-based authorization, and network policy enforcement, making it a powerful tool for improving deployment workflows in hybrid environments.