Connecting K8s and Nomad using a single Consul Server (DC1). Is this even possible or what is the next best way to do so?

Currently I have setup K8s cluster, Nomad cluster and a consul server outside of both of them. I also have an assumption that these clusters are owned by different teams / stakeholders hence, they should be in their own admin boundaries.

I am trying to use a single consul server (DC) to connect a K8s and a Nomad cluster to achieve workload failover & load balancing. So far I have achieved the following;

• Setup 1 Consul server externally
• Connected the K8s and Nomad as data planes to this external consul server

However, this doesn’t seem right since everything (the nomad and k8s services) is mixed in a single server. While searching I found about Admin Partitions to enable you to define administrative and communication boundaries between services managed by separate teams or belonging to separate stakeholders. However, since this is an Enterprise feature it is not possible to use it for me.

I also came across WAN Federation and for that we have to have multiple Consul servers (DCs) to connect. In my case Consul servers has to be installed on both K8s and Nomad.

As per my understanding there is no alternative way to use 1 single Consul server (DC) to connect multiple clusters.

I am confused on selecting what actual way should I proceed to use 1 single Consul Server (DC1) to connect k8s and nomad. I don’t know if that is even possible without Admin Partitions. If not what is the next best way to get it working. Also, I think I should use both service discovery and service mesh to realize this to enable communication between the services of separate clusters.

I kindly see your expert advice to resolve my issue.

Thank you so much in advance.

From the look fo it, if this doesn’t seem right since everything (the nomad and k8s services) is mixed in a single server is not something you want to accept, then: Not possible, you need consul enterprise. Consul not-enterprise has everything in one "plane", it has no multiple regions or datacenters or similar, everything is in one bucket.

You can setup multiple consuls with domain federation, or you can agree to the limitations, or you can pay for consul enterprise, or you can patch consul yourself, or you can use something differnet.

What I do I am just cautius and I have services from one place with -rl suffix and services from another place with some different suffix and try to keep services separated by manually keeping suffixes in all services.