Consul vs LXD

Overview

Consul

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.5K

Votes213

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks4.5K

LXD

Stacks104

Followers194

Votes68

Consul vs LXD: What are the differences?

Deployment: Consul is typically deployed as a set of independent servers while LXD is designed to be deployed on a single machine running the Linux operating system. Consul's distributed setup allows for high availability and fault tolerance in service discovery and orchestration processes.
Functionality: Consul primarily focuses on service discovery, configuration, and health checking for distributed systems, whereas LXD is more focused on lightweight virtualization through Linux containers, providing a system-level virtualization solution for applications.
Scaling: Consul is designed to scale horizontally by adding more server instances to handle increased workloads and manage larger sets of services, while LXD is limited to scaling vertically on a single machine by utilizing its host resources efficiently for running multiple containers.
Networking: Consul focuses on service networking and connecting various services within a distributed system effectively, ensuring reliable communication and coordination, while LXD focuses on providing network isolation and container networking within a single host machine without the complexity of distributed networking.
Management: Consul offers advanced features for service monitoring, discovery, and configuration management in dynamic environments, providing a robust solution for maintaining service integrity and reliability, whereas LXD offers simplified container management and deployment capabilities with a focus on resource efficiency on a single host.
Use Cases: Consul is commonly used in microservices architectures and cloud-native applications for managing service discovery and orchestration, while LXD is preferred for lightweight, portable, and isolated container deployments, suitable for development environments or server consolidation scenarios.

In Summary, Consul and LXD differ in deployment architecture, functionality focus, scaling capabilities, networking approach, management features, and preferred use cases in networking and cloud computing environments.

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Advice on Consul, LXD

Florian

IT DevOp at Agitos GmbH

Oct 22, 2019

Decided

lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.

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Detailed Comparison

Consul	LXD
Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.	LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.
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 104
Followers 1.5K	Followers 194
Votes 213	Votes 68
Pros & Cons
Pros 61 Great service discovery infrastructure 35 Health checking 29 Distributed key-value store 26 Monitoring 23 High-availability	Pros 10 More simple 8 Best 8 API 8 Open Source 7 Cluster
Integrations
No integrations available	LXC

What are some alternatives to Consul, LXD?

Docker

The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere

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

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.

LXC

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

rkt

Rocket is a cli for running App Containers. The goal of rocket is to be composable, secure, and fast.

Keepalived

The main goal of this project is to provide simple and robust facilities for loadbalancing and high-availability to Linux system and Linux based infrastructures.

Vagrant Cloud

Vagrant Cloud pairs with Vagrant to enable access, insight and collaboration across teams, as well as to bring exposure to community contributions and development environments.

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).

SmartStack

Scaling a web infrastructure requires services, and building a service-oriented infrastructure is hard. Make it EASY, with SmartStack’s automated, transparent service discovery and registration: cruise control for your distributed infrastructure.

Related Comparisons

Consul vs LXD: What are the differences?

Deployment: Consul is typically deployed as a set of independent servers while LXD is designed to be deployed on a single machine running the Linux operating system. Consul's distributed setup allows for high availability and fault tolerance in service discovery and orchestration processes.
Functionality: Consul primarily focuses on service discovery, configuration, and health checking for distributed systems, whereas LXD is more focused on lightweight virtualization through Linux containers, providing a system-level virtualization solution for applications.
Scaling: Consul is designed to scale horizontally by adding more server instances to handle increased workloads and manage larger sets of services, while LXD is limited to scaling vertically on a single machine by utilizing its host resources efficiently for running multiple containers.
Networking: Consul focuses on service networking and connecting various services within a distributed system effectively, ensuring reliable communication and coordination, while LXD focuses on providing network isolation and container networking within a single host machine without the complexity of distributed networking.
Management: Consul offers advanced features for service monitoring, discovery, and configuration management in dynamic environments, providing a robust solution for maintaining service integrity and reliability, whereas LXD offers simplified container management and deployment capabilities with a focus on resource efficiency on a single host.
Use Cases: Consul is commonly used in microservices architectures and cloud-native applications for managing service discovery and orchestration, while LXD is preferred for lightweight, portable, and isolated container deployments, suitable for development environments or server consolidation scenarios.

Consul vs LXD

Overview