Buildbot vs Consul: What are the differences?
Developers describe Buildbot as "Python-based continuous integration testing framework". BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure. 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.
Buildbot can be classified as a tool in the "Continuous Integration" category, while Consul is grouped under "Open Source Service Discovery".
Some of the features offered by Buildbot are:
- run builds on a variety of slave platforms
- arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever
- minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted
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.
"Highly configurable builds" is the primary reason why developers consider Buildbot over the competitors, whereas "Great service discovery infrastructure" was stated as the key factor in picking Consul.
Buildbot and Consul are both open source tools. Consul with 16.4K GitHub stars and 2.85K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Buildbot with 4K GitHub stars and 1.37K GitHub forks.
Slack, DigitalOcean, and Rainist are some of the popular companies that use Consul, whereas Buildbot is used by Mozilla, Animoto, and Fetch Robotics. Consul has a broader approval, being mentioned in 134 company stacks & 55 developers stacks; compared to Buildbot, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.
