Official docs outline
13 sections- Architecture
Agents, servers, clients, datacenters and the control/data plane.
- Service Discovery
Registering services and discovering them via DNS and HTTP.
- Services and Health Checks
Service definitions and health checks.
- DNS Interface
DNS queries, service lookups and DNS forwarding.
- Key/Value Store
Dynamic configuration through the KV store.
- Consensus and Gossip
Raft consensus and gossip protocol.
- Service Mesh
Sidecar proxies, intentions and mTLS between services.
- Configuration Entries
Central configuration of proxy defaults and routing.
- Gateways
Ingress, API and terminating gateways.
- ACL System
ACL tokens, policies and roles.
- Gossip and TLS Encryption
Gossip encryption and RPC TLS.
- Multi-datacenter and Cluster Peering
WAN federation, cluster peering and admin partitions.
- Consul on Kubernetes
Deploying Consul in Kubernetes.
Each section links to the official page. Titles and summaries by Extra Credit; the docs belong to their authors.