Based on the output above, gossip encryption has been enabled as the value of Gossip encrypt is true. Also, a TLS certificate has NOT been provided since RPC-TLS shows as false. Remember that by default, none of these security mechanisms are configured, so you must configure them as needed in your environment.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/docs/security/encryption

Consul KV is enabled automatically on Consul agents; you don't need to enable it in Consul's configuration.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/tutorials/interactive/get-started-key-value-store

Watches are a way of specifying a view of data (e.g. list of nodes, KV pairs, health checks) which is monitored for updates. When an update is detected, an external handler is invoked. A handler can be any executable or HTTP endpoint.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/docs/dynamic-app-config/watches#http-endpoint

Consul makes use of two different gossip pools. We refer to each pool as the LAN or WAN pool respectively. Each datacenter Consul operates in has a LAN gossip pool containing all members of the datacenter, both clients and servers. The LAN pool is used for a few purposes.

Membership information allows clients to automatically discover servers, reducing the amount of configuration needed. The distributed failure detection allows the work of failure detection to be shared by the entire cluster instead of concentrated on a few servers. Lastly, the gossip pool allows for reliable and fast event broadcasts.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/docs/architecture/gossip#gossip-in-consul

If gossip encryption is enabled in one datacenter, it must be enabled in all datacenters because in order to communicate with that one datacenter the encryption key is required.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/docs/security/encryption

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/tutorials/networking/federation-gossip-wan

When defining a prepared query, the default endpoint for using the prepared query is <name>.query.consul.

If the user is trying to access it using web-app.service.consul, the user may be hitting the service directly, and not taking advantage of the prepared query at all. Therefore, if the local service were to go down, the failover policy would not be used, since you must hit the DNS name of the prepared query to take advantage of a failover policy.

The following types are supported.

   key - Watch a specific KV pair

   keyprefix - Watch a prefix in the KV store

   services - Watch the list of available services

   nodes - Watch the list of nodes

   service- Watch the instances of a service

   checks - Watch the value of health checks

   event - Watch for custom user events

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/docs/dynamic-app-config/watches#watch-types

Consul-Template can render a new configuration file with data it retrieves directly from the Consul K/V. Therefore, Stephen could set up Consul-Template to grab the data he needs from Consul and write that data to the local application configuration file when the application is provisioned.

https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template

While Consul has many features, it cannot help you with application deployment. You can, however, use all the other features to access and configure your application.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/docs/intro

For this service definition, the instance of the service is watermark_web_a but the service itself will be named picture_app. The service definition has a port defined of 8080, so that is the port the service will run on.

The health check is checking that a service is running on port 80 on the same host, but that is not the port that the picture_app will be registered on.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/docs/discovery/services