When multiple Vaults are run in front of a Consul backend, what is the purpose?

When multiple Vaults are run in front of a Consul backend, the primary purpose is to provide redundancy and high availability. By deploying several instances of Vault, organizations can ensure that their secret management service remains operational even if one or more instances fail. This setup allows users to continue accessing their secrets without interruption and guarantees that the service can tolerate hardware or software failures, network outages, or any other potential issues that might disrupt a single instance.

In addition to enhancing availability, this architecture also allows for failover capabilities. If one Vault instance becomes unreachable, clients can automatically redirect their requests to another instance, thereby minimizing downtime and enhancing the overall reliability of secret management processes.

Other options, such as handling static content or encrypting data transmissions, do not directly relate to the operational goals of deploying multiple Vaults behind Consul. While load balancing might occur as a secondary effect of multiple Vaults, the fundamental objective revolves around redundancy and ensuring high availability for critical infrastructure and services reliant on Vault for secret management.