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  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. API Tools
  4. Service Discovery
  5. Consul vs SkyDNS

Consul vs SkyDNS

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Consul
Consul
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.5K
Votes213
GitHub Stars29.5K
Forks4.5K
SkyDNS
SkyDNS
Stacks8
Followers23
Votes2
GitHub Stars2.2K
Forks304

Consul vs SkyDNS: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This Markdown code provides a comparison of key differences between Consul and SkyDNS, two popular service discovery tools used in modern cloud environments.

1. **Protocol Support**: Consul supports both DNS and HTTP interfaces for service discovery, making it versatile for different applications and environments. SkyDNS, on the other hand, primarily relies on DNS for service discovery, which may limit its compatibility with certain protocols or applications.

2. **Consistency**: Consul uses a consistent key-value store to maintain service discovery data, ensuring that all nodes have the most up-to-date information. SkyDNS, while reliable, may face occasional consistency issues due to its distributed nature and reliance on DNS.

3. **Health Checking**: Consul provides built-in health checking functionalities, allowing services to check the status of their dependencies and react accordingly. SkyDNS lacks this native health checking feature, requiring additional tools or configurations for monitoring service health.

4. **Clustering**: Consul offers built-in clustering support, enabling easy scalability and high availability for service discovery across multiple nodes. SkyDNS, while capable of clustering, may require more manual configuration and management to achieve similar levels of scalability.

5. **WAN Federation**: Consul comes with robust WAN federation capabilities, facilitating service discovery across multiple data centers or cloud regions seamlessly. SkyDNS, on the other hand, may require additional configurations or extensions to achieve the same level of WAN federation.

6. **Community Support**: Consul has a larger and more active community of developers and users, providing extensive documentation, support, and resources for troubleshooting. SkyDNS, while widely used, may have a smaller community presence, leading to potential challenges in finding help or resources when needed.

In Summary, the key differences between Consul and SkyDNS lie in their protocol support, consistency, health checking capabilities, clustering features, WAN federation support, and community backing.

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Detailed Comparison

Consul
Consul
SkyDNS
SkyDNS

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

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).

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.
You announce your service by submitting JSON over HTTP to SkyDNS with information about your service. This information will then be available for queries either via DNS or HTTP.;SkyDNS requires that services submit an HTTP request to update their TTL within the TTL they last supplied. If the service fails to do so within this timeframe SkyDNS will expire the service automatically. This will allow for nodes to fail and DNS to reflect this quickly.;You can find services by querying SkyDNS via any DNS client or utility. It uses a known domain syntax with wildcards to find matching services.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
29.5K
GitHub Stars
2.2K
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
304
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
8
Followers
1.5K
Followers
23
Votes
213
Votes
2
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
Pros
  • 2
    Srv discovery for etcd

What are some alternatives to Consul, SkyDNS?

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.

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.

Serf

Serf

Serf is a service discovery and orchestration tool that is decentralized, highly available, and fault tolerant. Serf runs on every major platform: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is extremely lightweight: it uses 5 to 10 MB of resident memory and primarily communicates using infrequent UDP messages.

Nacos

Nacos

It is an easy-to-use dynamic service discovery, configuration and service management platform for building cloud native applications.

Libraries.io

Libraries.io

It is an open source web service that lists software development project dependencies and alerts developers to new versions of the software libraries they are using.

ODD Platform

ODD Platform

It is a next-generation data discovery and observability tool for enterprises and startups that help to efficiently democratize data, powers collaboration of data science and data engineering teams, significantly reduces time to data discovery, cuts on data downtime and offers a modern, easy-to-use environment with quick time-to-value. It makes all your data entities reliable, observable, and easily discoverable.

Baker Street

Baker Street

Baker Street is an HAProxy-based client side load balancer that simplifies scaling, testing, and upgrading microservices.

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