Consul vs Weave

Overview

Consul

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.5K

Votes213

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks4.5K

Weave

Stacks50

Followers72

Votes7

Consul vs Weave: What are the differences?

Deployment: Consul focuses on providing service discovery, configuration, and segmentation, while Weave primarily focuses on container networking and Kubernetes integration. Consul is widely used in various environments for its service discovery capabilities, while Weave is preferable for networking within containerized environments.
Protocol Support: Consul supports various protocols for service discovery, including DNS, HTTP, and gRPC, making it versatile for different applications. On the other hand, Weave primarily uses its proprietary mesh networking approach for container communication, which can be restrictive for certain use cases that require specific protocols.
Scalability: Consul is known for its scalability and can handle large-scale deployments effectively, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications. Weave, on the other hand, may face challenges in extremely large deployments due to its networking-centric approach, which can impact performance in highly dynamic environments.
Monitoring and Metrics: Consul provides robust monitoring and metrics capabilities to track the health and performance of services in real-time, offering enhanced visibility for operations teams. Weave, while offering some monitoring features, may not provide the same level of detailed metrics and monitoring as Consul, which can be a crucial factor for organizations with stringent monitoring requirements.
Community and Support: Consul has a large and active community with extensive documentation, making it easier for users to find resources, seek help, and contribute to the platform's development. Weave also has a supportive community but may not be as extensive as Consul, affecting the availability of resources and support for users.
Integration with Other Tools: Consul offers seamless integration with a wide range of tools and platforms, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana, enhancing its compatibility with existing infrastructures. Weave, while compatible with Kubernetes, may have limitations in terms of integrating with other tools and platforms, potentially affecting its overall usability in diverse environments.

In Summary, Consul and Weave differ significantly in their focus areas, scalability, protocol support, monitoring capabilities, community support, and integration with other tools, making them suitable for distinct use cases based on specific requirements.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Consul	Weave
Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.	Weave can traverse firewalls and operate in partially connected networks. Traffic can be encrypted, allowing hosts to be connected across an untrusted network. With weave you can easily construct applications consisting of multiple containers, running anywhere.
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.	Virtual Ethernet Switch;Application isolation;Security;Host network integration;Service export;Service import;Multi-cloud networking;Multi-hop routing;Dynamic topologies;Container mobility;Fault tolerance
Statistics
GitHub Stars 29.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 4.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 50
Followers 1.5K	Followers 72
Votes 213	Votes 7
Pros & Cons
Pros 61 Great service discovery infrastructure 35 Health checking 29 Distributed key-value store 26 Monitoring 23 High-availability	Pros 3 Easy setup 3 Seamlessly with mesos/marathon 1 Seamless integration with application layer
Integrations
No integrations available	Docker boot2docker

What are some alternatives to Consul, Weave?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

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.

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

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 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.

Related Comparisons

Consul vs Weave: What are the differences?

Deployment: Consul focuses on providing service discovery, configuration, and segmentation, while Weave primarily focuses on container networking and Kubernetes integration. Consul is widely used in various environments for its service discovery capabilities, while Weave is preferable for networking within containerized environments.
Protocol Support: Consul supports various protocols for service discovery, including DNS, HTTP, and gRPC, making it versatile for different applications. On the other hand, Weave primarily uses its proprietary mesh networking approach for container communication, which can be restrictive for certain use cases that require specific protocols.
Scalability: Consul is known for its scalability and can handle large-scale deployments effectively, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications. Weave, on the other hand, may face challenges in extremely large deployments due to its networking-centric approach, which can impact performance in highly dynamic environments.
Monitoring and Metrics: Consul provides robust monitoring and metrics capabilities to track the health and performance of services in real-time, offering enhanced visibility for operations teams. Weave, while offering some monitoring features, may not provide the same level of detailed metrics and monitoring as Consul, which can be a crucial factor for organizations with stringent monitoring requirements.
Community and Support: Consul has a large and active community with extensive documentation, making it easier for users to find resources, seek help, and contribute to the platform's development. Weave also has a supportive community but may not be as extensive as Consul, affecting the availability of resources and support for users.
Integration with Other Tools: Consul offers seamless integration with a wide range of tools and platforms, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana, enhancing its compatibility with existing infrastructures. Weave, while compatible with Kubernetes, may have limitations in terms of integrating with other tools and platforms, potentially affecting its overall usability in diverse environments.

Consul vs Weave

Overview