Consul vs Docker Swarm

Overview

Consul

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.5K

Votes213

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks4.5K

Docker Swarm

Stacks779

Followers990

Votes282

Consul vs Docker Swarm: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of containerization, there are several orchestration tools available to manage containerized applications. Two popular options are Consul and Docker Swarm. While both tools offer similar functionalities, they have key differences that set them apart. Here, we will explore these differences in detail:

Architecture and Purpose: Consul is a service mesh solution that primarily focuses on service discovery and management, providing features like service registry, health checking, and key-value storage. On the other hand, Docker Swarm is a native clustering and orchestration solution built into Docker, allowing the management of a swarm of Docker nodes, deployment of services, and load balancing.
Scalability and Number of Nodes: Docker Swarm provides a more scalable solution compared to Consul. Docker Swarm supports larger clusters, accommodating hundreds or even thousands of worker nodes, making it suitable for large-scale deployments. Consul, on the other hand, is better suited for smaller or medium-sized deployments, supporting a limited number of nodes.
Supported Container Runtimes: Docker Swarm has the advantage of being tightly integrated with the Docker ecosystem, supporting only Docker as the container runtime. Consul, on the other hand, is a more agnostic solution, supporting multiple container runtimes like Docker, rkt, and more. This flexibility allows Consul to be used in environments with mixed container runtime requirements.
Fault Tolerance and High Availability: Docker Swarm offers automatic fault tolerance and high availability features out of the box. It provides features like automatic re-scheduling of failed tasks, manager node redundancy, and automatic leader election. On the other hand, Consul requires additional configuration and setup to achieve high availability and fault tolerance, including running in a cluster mode with multiple instances.
Networking and Overlay Networks: Docker Swarm uses Docker's built-in overlay network driver to enable communication between services across multiple nodes. This simplifies networking setup and allows seamless communication between containers. On the other hand, Consul provides a more advanced network mesh by utilizing a sidecar proxy model, enabling features like service segmentation and traffic splitting. This makes Consul ideal for complex networking scenarios.
Community and Ecosystem: Docker Swarm benefits from being part of the larger Docker ecosystem, leveraging its large and active community. This results in an extensive set of resources, documentation, and community support. Consul, although part of the HashiCorp ecosystem, has a smaller community compared to Docker Swarm. However, it has its own dedicated user base and a growing ecosystem around it.

In Summary, Consul and Docker Swarm differ in their architecture and purpose, scalability, supported container runtimes, fault tolerance and high availability, networking capabilities, and community size. Understanding these differences is crucial while choosing the right orchestration tool based on the specific requirements of your container deployment.

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Advice on Consul, Docker Swarm

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

Decidedon

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Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

@{GitHub}|tool:27| (incl. @{GitHub Pages}|tool:683|/@{Markdown}|tool:1147| for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
Respectively @{Git}|tool:1046| as revision control system
@{SourceTree}|tool:1599| as @{Git}|tool:1046| GUI
@{Visual Studio Code}|tool:4202| as IDE
@{CircleCI}|tool:190| for continuous integration (automatize development process)
@{Prettier}|tool:7035| / @{TSLint}|tool:5561| / @{ESLint}|tool:3337| as code linter
@{SonarQube}|tool:2638| as quality gate
@{Docker}|tool:586| as container management (incl. @{Docker Compose}|tool:3136| for multi-container application management)
@{VirtualBox}|tool:774| for operating system simulation tests
@{Kubernetes}|tool:1885| as cluster management for docker containers
@{Heroku}|tool:133| for deploying in test environments
@{nginx}|tool:1052| as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
@{SSLMate}|tool:2752| (using @{OpenSSL}|tool:3091|) for certificate management
@{Amazon EC2}|tool:18| (incl. @{Amazon S3}|tool:25|) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
@{PostgreSQL}|tool:1028| as preferred database system
@{Redis}|tool:1031| as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Consul	Docker Swarm
Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.	Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.
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.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 29.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 4.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 779
Followers 1.5K	Followers 990
Votes 213	Votes 282
Pros & Cons
Pros 61 Great service discovery infrastructure 35 Health checking 29 Distributed key-value store 26 Monitoring 23 High-availability	Pros 55 Docker friendly 46 Easy to setup 40 Standard Docker API 38 Easy to use 23 Native Cons 9 Low adoption
Integrations
No integrations available	Docker

What are some alternatives to Consul, Docker Swarm?

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.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

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.

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

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 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.

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

Related Comparisons

Consul vs Docker Swarm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture and Purpose: Consul is a service mesh solution that primarily focuses on service discovery and management, providing features like service registry, health checking, and key-value storage. On the other hand, Docker Swarm is a native clustering and orchestration solution built into Docker, allowing the management of a swarm of Docker nodes, deployment of services, and load balancing.
Scalability and Number of Nodes: Docker Swarm provides a more scalable solution compared to Consul. Docker Swarm supports larger clusters, accommodating hundreds or even thousands of worker nodes, making it suitable for large-scale deployments. Consul, on the other hand, is better suited for smaller or medium-sized deployments, supporting a limited number of nodes.
Supported Container Runtimes: Docker Swarm has the advantage of being tightly integrated with the Docker ecosystem, supporting only Docker as the container runtime. Consul, on the other hand, is a more agnostic solution, supporting multiple container runtimes like Docker, rkt, and more. This flexibility allows Consul to be used in environments with mixed container runtime requirements.
Fault Tolerance and High Availability: Docker Swarm offers automatic fault tolerance and high availability features out of the box. It provides features like automatic re-scheduling of failed tasks, manager node redundancy, and automatic leader election. On the other hand, Consul requires additional configuration and setup to achieve high availability and fault tolerance, including running in a cluster mode with multiple instances.
Networking and Overlay Networks: Docker Swarm uses Docker's built-in overlay network driver to enable communication between services across multiple nodes. This simplifies networking setup and allows seamless communication between containers. On the other hand, Consul provides a more advanced network mesh by utilizing a sidecar proxy model, enabling features like service segmentation and traffic splitting. This makes Consul ideal for complex networking scenarios.
Community and Ecosystem: Docker Swarm benefits from being part of the larger Docker ecosystem, leveraging its large and active community. This results in an extensive set of resources, documentation, and community support. Consul, although part of the HashiCorp ecosystem, has a smaller community compared to Docker Swarm. However, it has its own dedicated user base and a growing ecosystem around it.

Consul vs Docker Swarm

Overview