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  1. Stackups
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  4. Service Discovery
  5. Consul vs OpenStack

Consul vs OpenStack

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Consul
Consul
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.5K
Votes213
GitHub Stars29.5K
Forks4.5K
OpenStack
OpenStack
Stacks790
Followers1.2K
Votes138

Consul vs OpenStack: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This Markdown code highlights the key differences between Consul and OpenStack.

1. **Deployment Type**: Consul is primarily used for service discovery and configuration management in a microservices architecture, while OpenStack is a cloud computing platform that provides infrastructure as a service. Consul focuses on internal service communication within a distributed system, whereas OpenStack offers a suite of services for managing virtualized resources in a data center.
2. **Scalability**: Consul is designed to be lightweight and highly scalable, making it suitable for dynamic environments with a large number of services. On the other hand, OpenStack can handle massive workloads and is ideal for enterprise-level cloud deployments requiring extensive scalability and resource management capabilities.
3. **Use Case**: Consul is commonly used to facilitate communication between microservices, ensuring that services can discover and communicate with each other efficiently. OpenStack, on the other hand, caters to organizations looking to build and manage private or public clouds, offering a range of services such as compute, networking, and storage.
4. **Community Support**: Consul is maintained by HashiCorp and has a dedicated community that contributes to its development and support. OpenStack, being an open-source project, has a larger community backing it, with contributions from various organizations and individuals worldwide.
5. **Ecosystem Integration**: Consul seamlessly integrates with other HashiCorp tools like Vault and Nomad, providing a comprehensive solution for service discovery, security, and scheduling. OpenStack, on the other hand, offers an extensive ecosystem of plugins and APIs that allow for integration with different technologies and services, making it highly versatile.
6. **Orchestration Capabilities**: While Consul provides basic service orchestration capabilities through its service registry and health checking features, OpenStack offers advanced orchestration tools like Heat for defining and managing infrastructure as code, enabling automated deployment and scaling of cloud resources.

In Summary, Consul and OpenStack differ in deployment type, scalability, use case, community support, ecosystem integration, and orchestration capabilities, catering to distinct needs in service-oriented architecture and cloud computing environments.

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Detailed Comparison

Consul
Consul
OpenStack
OpenStack

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

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

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.
Compute;Storage;Networking;Dashboard;Shared Services
Statistics
GitHub Stars
29.5K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
790
Followers
1.5K
Followers
1.2K
Votes
213
Votes
138
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
Pros
  • 60
    Private cloud
  • 39
    Avoid vendor lock-in
  • 23
    Flexible in use
  • 7
    Industry leader
  • 5
    Robust architecture

What are some alternatives to Consul, OpenStack?

Apache CloudStack

Apache CloudStack

CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

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.

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.

Keepalived

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.

VirtKick

VirtKick

Software as a service platform for hosting providers.

SkyDNS

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

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.

OpenNebula

OpenNebula

It provides a simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable on-premise enterprise clouds in existing infrastructures. It can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster, which is usually referred as Private Cloud. It supports Hybrid Cloud to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is open source software for building private, AWS-compatible IT, QA, and developer clouds. It makes it easy to deliver cloud computing, just like AWS, from within your data center.

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