What is Consul?
Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
Consul is a tool in the Open Source Service Discovery category of a tech stack.
Consul is an open source tool with 16.2K GitHub stars and 2.8K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Consul's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Consul?
Companies
130 companies use Consul in their tech stacks, including imgix, Leftronic, and SendGrid.
Developers
52 developers use Consul.
Consul Integrations
Otto, StackStorm, Rancher, Patroni, and Terraform are some of the popular tools that integrate with Consul. Here's a list of all 5 tools that integrate with Consul.
Why developers like Consul?
Here’s a list of reasons why companies and developers use Consul
Top Reasons
Consul Reviews
Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Consul in their tech stack.
John Kodumal
LaunchDarkly
Kafka
Amazon Kinesis
Redis
Amazon EC2
Amazon ElastiCache
Consul
Patroni
TimescaleDB
PostgreSQL
Amazon RDS
As we've evolved or added additional infrastructure to our stack, we've biased towards managed services. Most new backing stores are Amazon RDS instances now. We do use self-managed PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB for time-series data—this is made HA with the use of Patroni and Consul.
We also use managed Amazon ElastiCache instances instead of spinning up Amazon EC2 instances to run Redis workloads, as well as shifting to Amazon Kinesis instead of Kafka.
Chris Hartwig
Consul
All our services use Consul for discovery, configuration and cluster management (auto scaling, health monitoring, dynamic reconfiguration, leader elections) Consul
Consul's features
- Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.
- Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.
- Key/Value Storage - A flexible key/value store enables storing dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.
- Multi-Datacenter - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can support any number of regions without complex configuration.
Consul Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Consul?
etcd
etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.
Zookeeper
A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.
SkyDNS
SkyDNS is a distributed service for announcement and discovery of services. It leverages Raft for high-availability and consensus, and utilizes DNS queries to discover available services. This is done by leveraging SRV records in DNS, with special meaning given to subdomains, priorities and weights (more info here: http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns).
Ambassador
Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP.
Redis
Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.
