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

Consul vs SmartStack

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Consul
Consul
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.5K
Votes213
GitHub Stars29.5K
Forks4.5K
SmartStack
SmartStack
Stacks7
Followers51
Votes1
GitHub Stars245
Forks44

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Consul
Consul
SmartStack
SmartStack

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

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.

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.
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.;Synapse acts on information the moment it’s published in Zookeeper, and reconfiguring HAProxy is very very fast most of the time. Because we utilize HAProxy’s stats socket for many changes, we don’t even restart the process unless we have to add new backends.;Because our infrastructure is distributed, we cannot do centralized planning. But HAProxy provides very configurable queueing semantics. For our biggest clients, we set up intelligent queueing at the HAProxy layer;for others, we at least guarantee round-robin.;Doing debugging or maintenance on a backend is as simple as stopping the Nerve process on the machine;nothing else is affected!;You can see exactly which backends are available simply by looking at the HAProxy status page. Because of HAProxy’s excellent log output, you also get amazing aggregate and per-request information, including statistics on number of behavior of requests right in rsyslog.;The infrastructure is completely distributed. The most critical nodes are the Zookeeper nodes, and Zookeeper is specifically designed to be distributed and robust against failure.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
29.5K
GitHub Stars
245
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
44
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
7
Followers
1.5K
Followers
51
Votes
213
Votes
1
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
Pros
  • 1
    Elegant and powerful
Integrations
No integrations available
Chef
Chef

What are some alternatives to Consul, SmartStack?

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.

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).

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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