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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Consul vs Puppet Labs

Consul vs Puppet Labs

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs
Stacks1.3K
Followers793
Votes227
GitHub Stars7.7K
Forks2.2K
Consul
Consul
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.5K
Votes213
GitHub Stars29.5K
Forks4.5K

Consul vs Puppet Labs: What are the differences?

  1. Deployment Model: Consul mainly focuses on service discovery and key-value store, whereas Puppet Labs offers configuration management and automation services. Consul is more suited for dynamic environments where services are constantly changing, while Puppet Labs is preferred for managing infrastructure and ensuring consistency across servers.
  2. Language and Configuration: Consul uses a simple HTTP API to interact with services and store data, making it easy to integrate with various tools and platforms. On the other hand, Puppet Labs utilizes a custom Domain Specific Language (DSL) for configuration, which provides more advanced capabilities but may have a steeper learning curve for beginners.
  3. Agent vs. Agentless: Consul relies on lightweight agents running on each node to communicate and coordinate services, while Puppet Labs can operate in an agentless mode using SSH or WinRM for remote configuration tasks. This agent-based approach in Consul offers more real-time feedback and monitoring capabilities.
  4. Scalability and Performance: Consul is designed to be highly scalable and can handle large-scale deployments with ease, especially in distributed environments. Puppet Labs may experience performance issues in very large infrastructures due to the centralized nature of its architecture.
  5. Community and Ecosystem: Consul has a growing community and ecosystem of plugins and integrations, particularly for cloud-native environments and containerized applications. Puppet Labs, on the other hand, has a well-established community with a wide range of modules and extensions for managing different types of systems and applications.

In Summary, Consul excels in service discovery and real-time environments, while Puppet Labs shines in infrastructure management and automation at scale.

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Advice on Puppet Labs, Consul

Anonymous
Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

329k views329k
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Detailed Comparison

Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs
Consul
Consul

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

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

Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.;Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.;Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.;Configuration Management- Puppet Enterprise's declarative, model-based approach automates repetitive tasks and eliminates configuration drift. You define the desired state of your infrastructure, and Puppet Enterprise enforces this state, freeing you to work on tougher projects.;Orchestration- Quickly deploy critical updates, like security patches, across hundreds of servers in seconds, or proactively initiate Puppet runs to update configurations and report changes. Puppet Enterprise allows you to orchestrate controlled, multi-step operations to targeted collections of nodes, giving you complete control over infrastructure changes.;Reporting- Get visibility into your infrastructure, browse resources, and view reports that help you manage your configuration. Puppet Enterprise provides node hardware and software inventory, Puppet run change reports, and node configuration graphs via the product's console or 3rd party APIs.
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
7.7K
GitHub Stars
29.5K
GitHub Forks
2.2K
GitHub Forks
4.5K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
1.2K
Followers
793
Followers
1.5K
Votes
227
Votes
213
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 52
    Devops
  • 44
    Automate it
  • 26
    Reusable components
  • 21
    Dynamic and idempotent server configuration
  • 18
    Great community
Cons
  • 3
    Steep learning curve
  • 1
    Customs types idempotence
Pros
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability

What are some alternatives to Puppet Labs, Consul?

Ansible

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

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.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

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.

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