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  5. Consul vs Istio vs linkerd

Consul vs Istio vs linkerd

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Consul
Consul
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.5K
Votes213
GitHub Stars29.5K
Forks4.5K
linkerd
linkerd
Stacks132
Followers312
Votes7
Istio
Istio
Stacks2.3K
Followers1.5K
Votes54
GitHub Stars37.6K
Forks8.1K

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Advice on Consul, linkerd, Istio

Prateek
Prateek

Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

322k views322k
Comments
lyc218
lyc218

Feb 21, 2020

Needs advice

Envoy proxy is widely adopted in many companies for service mesh proxy, but it utilizes BoringSSL by default. Red Hat OpenShift fork envoy branch with their own OpenSSL support, I wonder any other companies are also using envoy-openssl branch for compatibility? How about AWS App Mesh?

Any input would be much appreciated!

42.7k views42.7k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Consul
Consul
linkerd
linkerd
Istio
Istio

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

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

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.

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.
Adaptive load-balancing;Fine-grained instrumentation;Abstractions over service discovery;Runtime traffic routing;Tech that's built for scale
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
29.5K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
37.6K
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
8.1K
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
132
Stacks
2.3K
Followers
1.5K
Followers
312
Followers
1.5K
Votes
213
Votes
7
Votes
54
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
Pros
  • 3
    CNCF Project
  • 1
    Fast Integration
  • 1
    Pre-check permissions
  • 1
    Light Weight
  • 1
    Service Mesh
Pros
  • 14
    Zero code for logging and monitoring
  • 9
    Service Mesh
  • 8
    Great flexibility
  • 5
    Resiliency
  • 5
    Ingress controller
Cons
  • 17
    Performance
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to Consul, linkerd, Istio?

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.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

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.

Moleculer

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

Express Gateway

Express Gateway

A cloud-native microservices gateway completely configurable and extensible through JavaScript/Node.js built for ALL platforms and languages. Enterprise features are FREE thanks to the power of 3K+ ExpressJS battle hardened modules.

ArangoDB Foxx

ArangoDB Foxx

It is a JavaScript framework for writing data-centric HTTP microservices that run directly inside of ArangoDB.

Dapr

Dapr

It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Zuul

Zuul

It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.

Jersey

Jersey

It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development.

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