HashiCorp has announced the preview release of federation between HCS datacenters as a service on Azure, enabling WAN Federation over mesh gateways. This feature allows users to extend their Consul environments to include additional datacenters, sharing security and traffic policies, and lowering operational overhead. Federation is a key aspect of Consul's functionality, referring to the interconnection of geographically separate computing clouds, facilitating communication between them. By designating a gateway for each datacenter, organizations can have independently operating Consul datacenters that share policy and connect across multiple environments with limited endpoints to be monitored and secured. This feature simplifies the operational burden on organizations, improves application performance, reduces latency, and enhances application resiliency by enabling rules to redirect traffic to secondary locations in case of service unavailability. Additionally, federation enables progressive application delivery tactics like canary deployments or A/B testing, aligning with typical cloud environments that stretch globally across multiple regions. The preview release is available as a preview feature, requiring additional steps for enabling it with the HCS environment.