consul/website/content/docs/enterprise/federation.mdx

---
layout: docs
page_title: Federated Network Areas (Enterprise)
description: >-
  Network areas connect individual datacenters in a WAN federation, providing an alternative to connecting every datacenter. Learn how to support hub-and-spoke network topologies in a WAN federated Consul deployment.
---

# Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation

<EnterpriseAlert>

This feature requires
self-managed Consul Enterprise.
Refer to the [enterprise feature matrix](/consul/docs/enterprise#consul-enterprise-feature-availability) for additional information.

</EnterpriseAlert>

Consul's core federation capability uses the same gossip mechanism that is used
for a single datacenter. This requires that every server from every datacenter
be in a fully connected mesh with an open gossip port (8302/tcp and 8302/udp)
and an open server RPC port (8300/tcp). For organizations with large numbers of
datacenters, it becomes difficult to support a fully connected mesh. It is often
desirable to have topologies like hub-and-spoke with central management
datacenters and "spoke" datacenters that can't interact with each other.

[Consul Enterprise](https://www.hashicorp.com/consul) offers a [network
area mechanism](/consul/tutorials/datacenter-operations/federation-network-areas) that allows operators to
federate Consul datacenters together on a pairwise basis, enabling
partially-connected network topologies. Once a link is created, Consul agents
can make queries to the remote datacenter in service of both API and DNS
requests for remote resources (in spite of the partially-connected nature of the
topology as a whole). Consul datacenters can simultaneously participate in both
network areas and the existing WAN pool, which eases migration.