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Consul vs SmartStack: What are the differences?
What is Consul? A tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration. Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
What is SmartStack? Automated service discovery and registration framework. 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.
Consul and SmartStack can be categorized as "Open Source Service Discovery" tools.
Some of the features offered by Consul are:
- 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.
On the other hand, SmartStack provides the following key features:
- Within a health check interval’s delay of a backend becoming healthy, it is made available in Zookeeper
- this makes it instantly available to consumers via Synapse’s Zookeeper watches.
- We detect problems within a health check interval, and take backends out of rotation. A mechanism which allows services to notify Nerve that they’re not healthy is planned, to reduce the interval further. In the meantime, deploys can stop Nerve when they start, and then re-start it at the end.
Consul and SmartStack are both open source tools. It seems that Consul with 16.4K GitHub stars and 2.85K forks on GitHub has more adoption than SmartStack with 228 GitHub stars and 41 GitHub forks.
Pros of Consul
- Great service discovery infrastructure61
- Health checking35
- Distributed key-value store29
- Monitoring26
- High-availability23
- Web-UI12
- Token-based acls10
- Gossip clustering6
- Dns server5
- Not Java4
- Docker integration1
- Javascript1
Pros of SmartStack
- Elegant and powerful1