github.com/sl1pm4t/consul@v1.4.5-0.20190325224627-74c31c540f9c/website/source/docs/enterprise/federation/index.html.md (about)

     1  ---
     2  layout: "docs"
     3  page_title: "Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation"
     4  sidebar_current: "docs-enterprise-federation"
     5  description: |-
     6    Consul Enterprise enables you to federate Consul datacenters together on a pairwise basis, enabling partially-connected network topologies like hub-and-spoke.
     7  ---
     8  
     9  # Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation
    10  
    11  Consul's core federation capability uses the same gossip mechanism that is used
    12  for a single datacenter. This requires that every server from every datacenter
    13  be in a fully connected mesh with an open gossip port (8302/tcp and 8302/udp)
    14  and an open server RPC port (8300/tcp). For organizations with large numbers of
    15  datacenters, it becomes difficult to support a fully connected mesh. It is often
    16  desirable to have topologies like hub-and-spoke with central management
    17  datacenters and "spoke" datacenters that can't interact with each other.
    18  
    19  [Consul Enterprise](https://www.hashicorp.com/consul.html) offers a [network
    20  area mechanism](/docs/guides/areas.html) that allows operators to
    21  federate Consul datacenters together on a pairwise basis, enabling
    22  partially-connected network topologies. Once a link is created, Consul agents
    23  can make queries to the remote datacenter in service of both API and DNS
    24  requests for remote resources (in spite of the partially-connected nature of the
    25  topology as a whole). Consul datacenters can simultaneously participate in both
    26  network areas and the existing WAN pool, which eases migration.