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Consul

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1.5K
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etcd

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Zookeeper

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Consul vs Zookeeper vs etcd: What are the differences?

Consul, Zookeeper, and etcd are all distributed key-value stores that are designed for cloud-native applications. They provide a reliable and scalable way of managing shared configurations, service discovery, and distributed coordination in a distributed system. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Consistency Model: Consul employs a strong consistency model ensuring that all nodes in the cluster have the same data simultaneously, providing reliable and predictable behavior for distributed systems. In contrast, Zookeeper utilizes a strict ordering protocol, guaranteeing linearizable writes and reads, thus enforcing strict consistency for critical operations. etcd mirrors Consul's approach with a strong consistency model, ensuring that data remains consistent across the distributed key-value store, making it suitable for scenarios demanding high consistency guarantees.

  2. API and Language Support: Consul's RESTful HTTP API facilitates easy integration with various programming languages, allowing developers to interact with the service seamlessly. Zookeeper, on the other hand, relies on a proprietary API and client libraries primarily aimed at Java developers, potentially limiting its adoption in polyglot environments. etcd bridges the gap by offering a gRPC API along with client libraries for multiple programming languages, including Go, Python, and JavaScript, ensuring broader language support and ease of integration across diverse ecosystems.

  3. Data Model: Consul and etcd embrace a key-value store model, enabling the association of arbitrary data with keys, offering flexibility and simplicity in data representation. In contrast, Zookeeper adopts a hierarchical file system-like namespace, enabling the creation of a structured data organization with nodes capable of having children nodes, making it more suitable for certain use cases requiring hierarchical data management.

  4. Use Cases: Consul excels in scenarios like service discovery, configuration management, and distributed key-value storage, making it an integral part of modern microservices architectures. Zookeeper finds its niche in coordination and synchronization tasks within distributed systems, such as leader election and distributed locks, providing essential building blocks for complex distributed applications. etcd shines in use cases involving distributed configuration storage and coordination between distributed systems, contributing to the seamless operation of Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native environments.

  5. Deployment and Scalability: Consul and etcd are typically deployed as standalone services or within containerized environments, offering horizontal scalability to accommodate growing workloads and ensuring fault tolerance. In contrast, Zookeeper is designed for deployment in a cluster mode, with an ensemble of servers forming a quorum, providing fault tolerance and high availability by leveraging distributed consensus algorithms.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Consul boasts a growing community and an active ecosystem of integrations and plugins, particularly in the cloud-native and DevOps tooling space, fostering innovation and collaboration. Zookeeper enjoys a mature ecosystem with extensive documentation and a large user base, especially prominent in the Hadoop and distributed systems communities, ensuring robust support and stability. etcd benefits from its status as a core component of Kubernetes and boasts a thriving ecosystem, with contributions from both the open-source community and companies utilizing it in production environments, ensuring continuous improvement and adoption across diverse use cases.

In summary, Consul focuses on service discovery and network segmentation, Zookeeper excels in distributed coordination and synchronization, while etcd provides simplicity and reliability as a building block for distributed systems.

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Pros of Consul
Pros of etcd
Pros of Zookeeper
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
  • 12
    Web-UI
  • 10
    Token-based acls
  • 6
    Gossip clustering
  • 5
    Dns server
  • 4
    Not Java
  • 1
    Docker integration
  • 11
    Service discovery
  • 6
    Fault tolerant key value store
  • 2
    Secure
  • 2
    Bundled with coreos
  • 1
    Consol integration
  • 1
    Privilege Access Management
  • 1
    Open Source
  • 11
    High performance ,easy to generate node specific config
  • 8
    Java
  • 8
    Kafka support
  • 5
    Spring Boot Support
  • 3
    Supports extensive distributed IPC
  • 2
    Curator
  • 2
    Used in ClickHouse
  • 2
    Supports DC/OS
  • 1
    Used in Hadoop
  • 1
    Embeddable In Java Service

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What is Consul?

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

What is 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.

What is 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.

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Why do developers choose Consul vs Zookeeper vs etcd?

  • Consul users call it a great service discovery infrastructure with high availability, health checking, gossip clustering, and Docker integration.
  • Zookeeper fans call it high performance and appreciate its Kafka and Spring Boot support.
  • etcd - etcd fans appreciate its fault tolerance as a key value store and that it’s bundled with Coreo.
What companies use Consul?
What companies use etcd?
What companies use Zookeeper?

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What tools integrate with Consul?
What tools integrate with etcd?
What tools integrate with Zookeeper?

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What are some alternatives to Consul, etcd, and Zookeeper?
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.
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
Istio
Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.
See all alternatives