I don't mean a literal circular dependency. I mean the documentation doesn't clearly articulate how to get to having all 3x in a production ready configuration

I don't mean a literal circular dependency. I mean the documentation doesn't clearly articulate how to get to having all 3x in a production ready configuration without bouncing around and piecing it together yourself. For example, you mention starting with consul. But here's a doc on using Vault to bootstrap the Consul CA and server certificates: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/vault-pki-consul-secure-tls?in=consul/vault-secure https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/vault-pki-consu... So I need vault first. Which, oops, the recommended storage until recently for that was Consul. So you need to decide how you're going to bootstrap. Vault's integrated Raft storage makes this a lot nicer, because you can start there and bootstrap Consul and Nomad after, and rely on Vault for production secret management, if you desire.