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  1. Stackups
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  4. Service Discovery
  5. Apache CloudStack vs Consul

Apache CloudStack vs Consul

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Consul
Consul
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.5K
Votes213
GitHub Stars29.5K
Forks4.5K
Apache CloudStack
Apache CloudStack
Stacks66
Followers250
Votes95
GitHub Stars2.7K
Forks1.2K

Apache CloudStack vs Consul: What are the differences?

Developers describe Apache CloudStack as "Open Source Cloud Computing". Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. On the other hand, Consul is detailed as "A tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration". Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

Apache CloudStack and Consul are primarily classified as "Open Source Cloud" and "Open Source Service Discovery" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Apache CloudStack are:

  • Works with hosts running XenServer/XCP, KVM, Hyper-V, and/or VMware ESXi with vSphere
  • Provides a friendly Web-based UI for managing the cloud
  • Provides a native API

On the other hand, Consul provides the following key 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.

"Apache CloudStack works" is the top reason why over 9 developers like Apache CloudStack, while over 49 developers mention "Great service discovery infrastructure" as the leading cause for choosing Consul.

Apache CloudStack and Consul are both open source tools. It seems that Consul with 16.4K GitHub stars and 2.85K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Apache CloudStack with 754 GitHub stars and 714 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

Consul
Consul
Apache CloudStack
Apache CloudStack

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

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.
Works with hosts running KVM, XenServer/XCP-ng, VMware ESXi with vSphere and HyperV; Provides a friendly Web-based UI for managing the cloud; Provides a native API; Manages storage for instances running on the hypervisors (primary storage) as well as templates, snapshots, and ISO images (secondary storage); Orchestrates network services from the data link layer (L2) to some application layer (L7) services, such as DHCP, NAT, firewall, VPN, and so on; Accounting of network, compute, and storage resources; Multi-tenancy/account separation; User management; Supports Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible
Statistics
GitHub Stars
29.5K
GitHub Stars
2.7K
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
1.2K
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
66
Followers
1.5K
Followers
250
Votes
213
Votes
95
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
Pros
  • 15
    Apache CloudStack works
  • 13
    Multi hypervisor
  • 10
    Easy setup
  • 9
    Open architecture
  • 9
    Real open source software

What are some alternatives to Consul, Apache CloudStack?

OpenStack

OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

Eureka

Eureka

Eureka is a REST (Representational State Transfer) based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers.

Zookeeper

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.

etcd

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.

Keepalived

Keepalived

The main goal of this project is to provide simple and robust facilities for loadbalancing and high-availability to Linux system and Linux based infrastructures.

VirtKick

VirtKick

Software as a service platform for hosting providers.

SkyDNS

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).

SmartStack

SmartStack

Scaling a web infrastructure requires services, and building a service-oriented infrastructure is hard. Make it EASY, with SmartStack’s automated, transparent service discovery and registration: cruise control for your distributed infrastructure.

OpenNebula

OpenNebula

It provides a simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable on-premise enterprise clouds in existing infrastructures. It can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster, which is usually referred as Private Cloud. It supports Hybrid Cloud to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is open source software for building private, AWS-compatible IT, QA, and developer clouds. It makes it easy to deliver cloud computing, just like AWS, from within your data center.

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