Protecting the communication paths

Now, I'm not sure about you, but when I start reading documents about AES, TLS, GCM, and so on, my eyes start to gloss over. The plethora of acronyms help us chase squirrels in all directions, but that's not going to help us secure our Consul cluster. So, my goal is to explain what we need to do to secure our system communications with minimal acronyms. This reminds me of the time I had to write a paper in high school without using any of the forms of the verb to be. Thanks, Mr. Farley. It is important to remember that, currently, we're only going to focus on securing our clients and servers. Securing and encrypting traffic for our services will come later, so please be patient.

In the second chapter of this book, we learned about the two primary modes of communication among the Consul components: Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and gossip. But wait – what about this Raft and consensus stuff we've read about? Well, all that...