The release of Consul 1.9 is a significant update aimed at enhancing the experience of running Consul on Kubernetes, providing features such as support for Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to manage resources within environments, improved OpenShift support, new service mesh visualization capabilities in the UI, and support for Kubernetes Readiness probes to enable real-time health data and traffic management. These updates address key gaps identified by users and create a more Kube-native experience for developers, while also providing value to users managing a service mesh across multiple platforms.