Merge pull request #8 from boruszak/introduction-content

Introduction-content

website/content/docs/architecture/backend.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+layout: docs
+page_title: Raft architecture
+description: >-
+  Consul ensures a consistent state using the Raft protocol. A quorum, or a majority of server agents with one leader, agree to state changes before committing to the state log. Learn about the Raft architecture in Consul and its requirements.
+---
+
+# Raft architecture
+
+Raft is a consensus algorithm that is based on
+[Paxos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29). Compared
+to Paxos, Raft is designed to have fewer states and a simpler, more
+understandable algorithm.
+
+## Raft index
+
+How the Raft index works
+
+## Backend
+
+BoltDB / WAL backend

website/content/docs/architecture/control-plane/index.mdx

@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
 ---
 layout: docs
-page_title: Consul Architecture
+page_title: onsul control plane architecture
 description: >-
   Consul datacenters consist of clusters of server agents (control plane) and client agents deployed alongside service instances (data plane). Learn how these components and their different communication methods make Consul possible.
 ---
 
-# Consul Architecture
+# Consul control plane architecture
 
 This topic provides an overview of the Consul architecture. We recommend reviewing the Consul [glossary](/consul/docs/install/glossary) as a companion to this topic to help you become familiar with HashiCorp terms.
 

website/content/docs/architecture/data-plane/index.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+layout: docs
+page_title: Consul data plane architecture
+description: >-
+  Consul provides features that help you manage your application's data plane. Learn about Consul's data plane, including its architectural components.
+---
+
+# Consul data plane architecture
+
+This topic describes Consul's architecture and operations in an application's data plane. Consul can deploy gateways and sidecar proxies to help you secure, observe, and manage application traffic.
+
+For information about the lightweight workload agents Consul uses for container-based applications on Kubernetes and AWS ECS, refer to [Consul data plane](/consul/docs/architecture/control-plane/dataplane).
+
+## Introduction
+
+Consul provides control plane features that help you manage your application's data plane, but it does not run directly in the data plane.
+
+When using Consul for service discovery, no additional components or configurations are required for the data plane.
+
+When using Consul's service mesh features, you can use Consul to create gateways and proxies for service-to-service traffic and to secure user interactions with services.
+
+## Gateways
+
+Gateways secure application traffic between services. There are four kinds of gateways:
+
+- API gateway
+- Ingress gateway
+- Terminating gateways
+- Mesh gateways
+
+## Sidecar proxies
+
+Consul can depoy sidecar proxies so that you can oberve and monitor application traffic.
+
+## Next steps
+
+Learn about [Consul's security architecture](/consul/docs/architecture/security) to learn about the encryption systems and verification protocols Consul uses to secure data plane operations.

website/content/docs/architecture/what-is-consul.mdx → website/content/docs/architecture/index.mdx

@@ -12,13 +12,13 @@ HashiCorp Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage s
 > **Hands-on**: Complete the Getting Started tutorials to learn how to deploy Consul:
 - [Get Started on Kubernetes](/consul/tutorials/get-started-kubernetes)
 - [Get Started on VMs](/consul/tutorials/get-started-vms)
-- [HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Consul](/consul/tutorials/get-started-hcp)
+- [HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Consul Dedicated](/consul/tutorials/get-started-hcp)
 
 ## How does Consul work?
 
-Consul provides a _control plane_ that enables you to register, query, and secure services deployed across your network. The control plane is the part of the network infrastructure that maintains a central registry to track services and their respective IP addresses. It is a distributed system that runs on clusters of nodes, such as physical servers, cloud instances, virtual machines, or containers. 
+Consul provides a _control plane_ that enables you to register, query, and secure services deployed across your network. The control plane is the part of the network infrastructure that maintains a central registry to track services and their respective IP addresses. It is a distributed system that runs on clusters of nodes, such as physical servers, cloud instances, virtual machines, or containers.
 
-Consul interacts with the _data plane_ through proxies. The data plane is the part of the network infrastructure that processes data requests. Refer to [Consul Architecture](/consul/docs/architecture) for details.
+Consul interacts with the _data plane_ through proxies. The data plane is the part of the network infrastructure that processes data requests.
 
 ![Basic Consul workflow](/img/what-is-consul-overview-diagram.png)
 
@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ The core Consul workflow consists of the following stages:
 - **Secure**: After services locate upstreams, Consul ensures that service-to-service communication is authenticated, authorized, and encrypted. Consul service mesh secures microservice architectures with mTLS and can allow or restrict access based on service identities, regardless of differences in compute environments and runtimes. 
 
 ## Why Consul?
+
 Consul increases application resilience, bolsters uptime, accelerates application deployment, and improves security across service-to-service communications. HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar explains how Consul solves networking challenges.
 
 <iframe
@@ -39,9 +40,13 @@ Consul increases application resilience, bolsters uptime, accelerates applicatio
   height="315"
 ></iframe>
 
+To learn more about Consul and how it compares to similar products, refer to [Consul use cases](/consul/docs/use-case).
+
 ### Automate service discovery
 
-Adopting a microservices architecture on cloud infrastructure is a critical step toward delivering value at scale, but knowing where healthy services are running on your networks in real time becomes a challenge. Consul automates service discovery by replacing service connections usually handled with load balancers with an identity-based service catalog. The service catalog is a centralized source of truth that you can query through Consul’s DNS server or API. The catalog always knows which services are available, which have been removed, and which services are healthy.
+Adopting a microservices architecture on cloud infrastructure is a critical step toward delivering value at scale, but knowing where healthy services are running on your networks in real time becomes a challenge. Consul automates service discovery by replacing service connections usually handled with load balancers with an identity-based service catalog. The [service catalog](/consul/docs/concept/catalog) is a centralized source of truth that you can query through Consul’s DNS server or API. The catalog always knows which services are available, which have been removed, and which services are healthy.
+
+To learn more about Consul's service discovery features and how they compares to similar products, refer to [Consul compared to other DNS tools](/consul/docs/use-case/dns).
 
 ### Connect services across runtimes and cloud providers
 

website/content/docs/architecture/security.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+layout: docs
+page_title: Consul security architecture
+description: >-
+  Consul 
+---
+
+# Consul security architecture
+
+HashiCorp Consul 

website/content/docs/automate/consul-template/index.mdx

@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
 ---
 layout: docs
-page_title: Consul Template overview
+page_title: Consul Template
 description: >-
   Consul Template is a tool available as a distinct binary that enables dynamic application configuration and secrets rotation for Consul deployments based on Go templates.
 ---
 
-# Consul Template overview
+# Consul Template
 
 This topic provides an overview of the Consul Template tool, which enables a programmatic method for rendering configuration files from a variety of locations, including the Consul KV store. It is an effective workflow option for replacing complicated API queries that often require custom formatting.
 
@@ -19,11 +19,215 @@ In a typical scenario, you run `consul-template` as a daemon that fetches the in
 
 The Consul template tool is flexible, it can fit into many different environments and workflows. Depending on the use case, you may have a single `consul-template` instance on a handful of hosts, or you may need to run several instances on every host. Each `consul-template` process can manage multiple unrelated files and removes duplicated information as needed when files share data dependencies.
 
+---
+id: dfa8928f-3eea-48cf-b639-8d1e73164c1e
+name: Service configuration with Consul Template
+short_name: Consul Template
+products_used:
+  - consul
+description: >-
+  Programmatically render configuration files from a variety of locations
+  including Consul KV with Consul Template
+read_time: 10
+default_collection_context: consul/developer-configuration
+---
+
+The Consul template tool provides a programmatic method for rendering 
+configuration files from a variety of locations, including Consul KV. It is an 
+ideal option for replacing complicated API queries that often require custom 
+formatting.
+The template tool is based on Go templates and shares many of the same attributes.
+
+Consul template is a useful tool with several applications. This tutorial will 
+focus on two of its use cases.
+
+1. _Update configuration files_. The Consul template tool can be used
+   to update service configuration files. A common use case is managing load
+   balancer configuration files that need to be updated regularly in a dynamic
+   infrastructure.
+
+1. _Discover data about the Consul datacenter and service_. It is possible to collect
+   information about the services in your Consul datacenter. For example, you could
+   collect a list of all services running on the datacenter or you could discover all
+   service addresses for the Redis service. Note, this use case has limited
+   scope for production.
+
+In this tutorial, you will get an introduction on how `consul-template` works,
+how to install it, and two use cases.
+
+Before completing this tutorial, you should have some familiarity with
+[Consul KV](/consul/tutorials/interactive/get-started-key-value-store)
+and [Go templates](https://golang.org/pkg/text/template/).
+
+## Introduction to Consul template
+
+Consul template is a simple, yet powerful tool. When initiated, it reads one or 
+more template files and queries Consul for all data needed to render them. 
+Typically, you run `consul-template` as a daemon which will fetch the initial 
+values and then continue to watch for updates, re-rendering the template 
+whenever there are relevant changes in the datacenter. You can alternatively use 
+the `-once` flag to fetch and render the template once which is useful for 
+testing and setup scripts that are triggered by some other automation for 
+example a provisioning tool. Finally, the template can also run arbitrary 
+commands after the update process completes. For example, it can send the HUP 
+signal to the load balancer service after a configuration change has been made.
+
+The Consul template tool is flexible, it can fit into many different 
+environments and workflows. Depending on the use-case, you may have a single 
+`consul-template` instance on a handful of hosts or may need to run several 
+instances on every host. Each `consul-template` process can manage multiple 
+unrelated files though and will de-duplicate the fetches as needed if those 
+files share data dependencies so it can reduce the load on Consul servers to 
+share where possible.
+
+## Install Consul template
+
+For this tutorial, you will use a local Consul agent in development mode which 
+can be started with `consul agent -dev`. To quickly set up a local Consul agent, 
+refer to the getting started [tutorial](/consul/tutorials/get-started-vms/virtual-machine-gs-deploy). 
+The Consul agent must be running to complete all of the following steps.
+
+The Consul template tool is not included with the Consul binary and will need to 
+be installed separately. It can be installed from a precompiled binary or 
+compiled from source. You will be installing the precompiled binary.
+
+First, download the binary from the 
+[Consul Template releases page](https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul-template/).
+
+```shell-session
+$ curl -O https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul-template/0.19.5/consul-template<_version_OS>.tgz
+```
+
+Next, extract the binary and move it into your `$PATH`.
+
+```shell-session
+$ tar -zxf consul-template<_version_OS>.tgz
+```
+
+To compile from source, check the instructions in the
+[contributing section in GitHub](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#contributing).
+
+## Use case: Consul KV
+
+In this first use case example, you will render a template that pulls the 
+HashiCorp address from Consul KV. To do this, you will create a simple template 
+that contains the HashiCorp address, run `consul-template`, add a value to 
+Consul KV for HashiCorp's address, and finally view the rendered file.
+
+First, you will need to create a template file `find_address.tpl` to query
+Consul's KV store:
+
+<CodeBlockConfig filename="find_address.tpl">
+
+```go
+{{ key "/hashicorp/street_address" }}
+```
+
+</CodeBlockConfig>
+
+Next, you will run `consul-template` specifying both the template to use and the 
+file to update.
+
+```shell-session
+$ consul-template -template "find_address.tpl:hashicorp_address.txt"
+```
+
+The `consul-template` process will continue to run until you kill it with 
+`CTRL+c`. For now, you will leave it running.
+
+Finally, open a new terminal so you can write data to the key in Consul using 
+the command line interface.
+
+```shell-session
+$ consul kv put hashicorp/street_address "101 2nd St"
+
+Success! Data written to: hashicorp/street_address
+```
+
+You can verify the data was written by viewing the `hashicorp_address.txt` file 
+which will be located in the same directory where `consul-template` was run.
+
+```shell-session
+$ cat hashicorp_address.txt
+
+101 2nd St
+```
+
+If you update the key `hashicorp/street_address`, you can see the changes to the 
+file immediately. Go ahead and try `consul kv put hashicorp/street_address "22b Baker ST"`.
+
+You can verify that this simple process can have powerful implications. For 
+example, it is possible to use this same process for updating your 
+[HAProxy load balancer configuration](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template/blob/master/examples/haproxy.md).
+
+You can now kill the `consul-template` process with `CTRL+c`.
+
+## Use case: discover all services
+
+In this use case example, you will discover all the services running in the 
+Consul datacenter. To follow along, you use the local development agent from the 
+previous example.
+
+First, you will need to create a new template `all-services.tpl` to query all 
+services.
+
+<CodeBlockConfig filename="all-services.tpl">
+
+```go
+{{ range services -}}
+# {{ .Name }}
+{{- range service .Name }}
+{{ .Address }}
+{{- end }}
+
+{{ end -}}
+```
+
+</CodeBlockConfig>
+
+Next, run Consul template specifying the template you just created and the 
+`-once` flag. The `-once` flag will tell the process to run once and then quit.
+
+```shell-session
+$ consul-template -template="all-services.tpl:all-services.txt" -once
+```
+
+If you complete this on your local development agent, you should still get the 
+`consul` service among the results when viewing `all-services.txt`.
+
+```plaintext hideClipboard
+# consul
+127.0.0.7
+```
+
+On a development or production datacenter, you would get a list of all the services.
+For example:
+
+```plaintext hideClipboard
+# consul
+104.131.121.232
+
+# redis
+104.131.86.92
+104.131.109.224
+104.131.59.59
+
+# web
+104.131.86.92
+104.131.109.224
+104.131.59.59
+```
+
 ## Tutorials
 
 To get started with Consul Template and learn more about how you can use it to configure and manage application deployments, refer to the following tutorials:
 
--  Learn how to programmatically render service configuration in the [Service configuration with Consul Template tutorial](/consul/tutorials/developer-configuration/consul-template).
 -  Learn how to use Consul and Consul template to automatically update an NGINX configuration file with the latest list of backend servers found by Consul's service discovery in the [Load Balancing with NGINX and Consul Template tutorial](/consul/tutorials/load-balancing/load-balancing-nginx).
 -  Learn how to use Vault's PKI Secrets Engine to generate and renew dynamic X.509 certificates and then use `consul-template` to rotate your certificates in the [Generate mTLS Certificates for Consul with Vault tutorial](/consul/tutorials/vault-secure/vault-pki-consul-secure-tls).
 -  Learn how to use Vault to store a gossip encryption key and then use `consul-template` to retrieve and rotate the key automatically in the [Automatically Rotate Gossip Encryption Keys Secured in Vault tutorial](/consul/tutorials/vault-secure/vault-kv-consul-secure-gossip).
+
+## Next steps
+
+In this tutorial, you learned how to set up and use the Consul template tool.
+To find additional examples, refer to the examples folder
+in [GitHub](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template/tree/master/examples).