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 25.2K GitHub stars and 4.1K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Consul's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Consul?
Companies
268 companies reportedly use Consul in their tech stacks, including Robinhood, Slack, and LaunchDarkly.
Developers
755 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Consul.
Consul Integrations
Terraform, Rancher, Traefik, Nomad, and Netdata are some of the popular tools that integrate with Consul. Here's a list of all 16 tools that integrate with Consul.
Pros of Consul
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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.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
