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AWS App Mesh vs Consul: What are the differences?
Introduction
AWS App Mesh and Consul are both service mesh solutions that provide traffic management and observability capabilities for microservices. While they have similar goals, there are key differences between the two platforms.
Integration with Microservices: AWS App Mesh is tightly integrated with AWS services, making it a suitable choice for applications hosted on AWS infrastructure. It leverages AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for service discovery and routing. On the other hand, Consul is platform-agnostic and can be used with any infrastructure, including AWS.
Service Discovery and Registry: Consul has its built-in service registry, which allows services to be created, registered, and discovered. It provides DNS-based service discovery and allows dynamic updates to service endpoints. In contrast, AWS App Mesh relies on AWS service discovery mechanisms, such as Amazon Route 53 or AWS CloudMap, for service registration and discovery.
Protocol Support: While both AWS App Mesh and Consul support multiple protocols, AWS App Mesh is primarily designed for HTTP-based communication. It offers advanced features like HTTP/2 and GRPC support, making it suitable for modern microservices architectures. Consul, on the other hand, supports a wide range of protocols including HTTP, TCP, and DNS.
Traffic Routing and Control: AWS App Mesh provides fine-grained control over traffic routing and offers advanced features like weighted routing, retries, and circuit breakers. It allows for declarative configuration through AWS CloudFormation or APIs. Consul also supports traffic routing and control but might require additional configuration using tools like Envoy Proxy.
Observability and Monitoring: AWS App Mesh integrates seamlessly with AWS CloudWatch, allowing for centralized monitoring, logging, and tracing of microservices. It provides rich observability features like distributed tracing with AWS X-Ray. Consul also offers observability features through integration with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Zipkin.
Vendor Lock-in and Ecosystem: AWS App Mesh is part of the AWS ecosystem and tightly integrated with other AWS services. While this provides convenience for AWS users, it can also lead to vendor lock-in. Consul, being platform-agnostic, offers more flexibility in terms of infrastructure choices and avoids any vendor lock-in concerns.
In summary, AWS App Mesh and Consul have key differences in terms of integration with infrastructure, service discovery mechanisms, protocol support, traffic control capabilities, observability features, and ecosystem integration. The choice between the two depends on the specific requirements of the application and the underlying infrastructure.
One of our applications is currently migrating to AWS, and we need to make a decision between using AWS API Gateway with AWS App Mesh, or Kong API Gateway with Kuma.
Some people advise us to benefit from AWS managed services, while others raise the vendor lock issue. So, I need your advice on that, and if there is any other important factor rather than vendor locking that I must take into consideration.
The benefit of using Kuma + Kong Gateway are:
- Feature-set: Kong + Kuma provide an end-to-end solution for both APIM and Service Mesh with a feature-set, and a performance, that is not matched by AWS services. In addition to this you can extend Kong Gateway with 70+ plugins out of the box and choose between 500+ plugins from the community to cover every use-case. In comparison, the feature-set of AWS API Gateway is quite limited and basic.
- Performance: Especially in the case of Kong Gateway, performance has always been a top priority for the project (more performance deliver more reliable applications). In some benchmarks the latency added by AWS API Gateway can be 200x more than what you would achieve with Kong Gateway natively which has been hand-crafted for maximum throughput.
- Cost: While cloud vendors like AWS make it very easy to get up and running with their services at a lower initial cost, that cost ramps up very quickly (exponentially) as the number of requests are increasing. With Kong GW you don't have this problem, since you can run tens of thousands of concurrent requests on a small EC2 instance (or Kubernetes Ingress, via the native K8s ingress controller for Kong Gateway).
- Portability: You can replicate your infrastructure on any other cloud, or on your development machines with ease. Want to run your gateway + mesh on your local Kubernetes cluster? You can do that. Want to run your infrastructure on another cloud provider? You can do that. Strategically you have full ownership of your infrastructure and its future. When it comes to Kuma, you can also run a Mesh on VM-based workloads in addition to Kubernetes (Kuma is universal).
- And much more.
Disclaimer: I am the CTO of Kong.
AWS App Mesh is useful when your micro services are deployed across Ec2 , EKS or ECS. Assume you are in process of migrating microservices from ec2 instances to ecs, its easy to switch using Virtual router configuration. As App Mesh is managed service and easy to bring up ,its worth giving it a try for your use case before choosing Kuma or any other tool.
Pros of AWS App Mesh
Pros of Consul
- Great service discovery infrastructure61
- Health checking35
- Distributed key-value store29
- Monitoring26
- High-availability23
- Web-UI12
- Token-based acls10
- Gossip clustering6
- Dns server5
- Not Java4
- Docker integration1
- Javascript1
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