Consul vs Zookeeper

Overview

Consul

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.5K

Votes213

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks4.5K

Zookeeper

Stacks889

Followers1.0K

Votes43

Consul vs Zookeeper: What are the differences?

Consul and Zookeeper are two popular distributed systems for service discovery and configuration management. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Consistency Model: Consul uses a strongly consistent model, ensuring that clients always see the latest published values. On the other hand, Zookeeper follows a weakly consistent model and may have a lag in propagating updates to clients, leading to potential data inconsistencies.
Ease of Deployment: Consul is designed to be easy to deploy and configure, with a simple binary installation and minimal dependencies. Zookeeper, on the other hand, requires Java to be installed and requires more complex configurations, making it potentially more challenging to set up.
Service Mesh Integration: Consul provides built-in support for service mesh features, such as service routing, traffic splitting, and observability. Zookeeper does not have native support for service mesh integration, requiring additional tools or custom development to achieve similar functionality.
Health Checking: Consul includes a built-in health checking mechanism that allows services to be monitored for their availability. Zookeeper, on the other hand, does not offer native health checking capabilities, requiring external tools or custom implementations.
Consul Template: Consul provides a built-in templating engine called Consul Template, which allows for dynamic configuration updates based on the latest service discovery information. Zookeeper does not have an equivalent feature, requiring external tools or custom scripting to achieve a similar result.
User Interface: Consul includes a web-based user interface that provides a visual representation of service discovery and management. Zookeeper does not have a dedicated user interface, necessitating the use of command-line tools or third-party applications for administration.

In summary, while Consul offers a modern, feature-rich solution with support for service mesh and health checking, Zookeeper is a battle-tested system known for its stability and strong consistency guarantees in large-scale distributed environments.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Consul	Zookeeper
Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.	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.
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 29.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 4.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 889
Followers 1.5K	Followers 1.0K
Votes 213	Votes 43
Pros & Cons
Pros 61 Great service discovery infrastructure 35 Health checking 29 Distributed key-value store 26 Monitoring 23 High-availability	Pros 11 High performance ,easy to generate node specific config 8 Java 8 Kafka support 5 Spring Boot Support 3 Supports extensive distributed IPC

What are some alternatives to Consul, Zookeeper?

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.

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

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 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).

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 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

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

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

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

Related Comparisons

Consul vs Zookeeper: What are the differences?

Consul and Zookeeper are two popular distributed systems for service discovery and configuration management. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Consistency Model: Consul uses a strongly consistent model, ensuring that clients always see the latest published values. On the other hand, Zookeeper follows a weakly consistent model and may have a lag in propagating updates to clients, leading to potential data inconsistencies.
Ease of Deployment: Consul is designed to be easy to deploy and configure, with a simple binary installation and minimal dependencies. Zookeeper, on the other hand, requires Java to be installed and requires more complex configurations, making it potentially more challenging to set up.
Service Mesh Integration: Consul provides built-in support for service mesh features, such as service routing, traffic splitting, and observability. Zookeeper does not have native support for service mesh integration, requiring additional tools or custom development to achieve similar functionality.
Health Checking: Consul includes a built-in health checking mechanism that allows services to be monitored for their availability. Zookeeper, on the other hand, does not offer native health checking capabilities, requiring external tools or custom implementations.
Consul Template: Consul provides a built-in templating engine called Consul Template, which allows for dynamic configuration updates based on the latest service discovery information. Zookeeper does not have an equivalent feature, requiring external tools or custom scripting to achieve a similar result.
User Interface: Consul includes a web-based user interface that provides a visual representation of service discovery and management. Zookeeper does not have a dedicated user interface, necessitating the use of command-line tools or third-party applications for administration.

Consul vs Zookeeper

Overview