I'm not asking for that, I am asking for a short, clear description of what their service is good for and why I might want it.
But if you like Marketing-Sites..please read that:
https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul
And now explain to me what it is please...
In case you're actually fishing for an explanation, Consul is basically a Very Nice™ DNS server for your service infrastructure.
Every piece of tech is generally worth the time investment, but you have to trust them and start learning the tool before you can realise what it actually does.
Consul is one such case...
Consul is much more than DNS of course, but at the core it's DNS.
Unless you describe it as fancy DNS with extra features, it's description page doesn't make much sense.
Oh yes Hashicorp is great please don't get me wrong, but if you just read that landing-page it's like WTF. But if you know what Hashi is doing and read the Documentation just a little bit everything becomes clear...but that page alone just sounds like pure Marketing blabla cloud stuff.
I think engineers know the reputation of hashicorp products at this point. The marketing site is for the C-suite people, documentation is for the technical people.
FWIW, their documentation pages [1] are actually a great landing page for technical readers. The comparison to other software is pretty good for "grounding" consul into your other infra.
[1]: https://www.consul.io/docs/intro [2]: https://www.consul.io/docs/intro/vs
I've used Consul, Vault, Vagrant and Terraform so far and all of them are worth the time investment (Nomad is on the todo-list but for personal reasons I cannot play with it right now).
It'd be great if Hashicorp used less marketing bs and provided a clearer description... At first I glanced the Vault description, didn't really understand what it was supposed to do and walked away thinking "I probably don't need it". Which is bad because once I started using it I really loved it.
If you don't understand how you may need their service, you do not need their service. I'd welcome being proven wrong, but I would bet money there's not a single customer they're missing by their current front page.
The only way you, as a person not knowing what ZFS is, would have any use of their service is if you, after explanation, are so motivated to pay them money that you change your own data hosting to match a service you previously didn't know you needed even if stumbling over it.