Overview
What is Consul?
HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in the IT infrastructure. It provides service discovery, health checking, key/value stores and support for multiple data centers out of the box.
Build a strong layer to handle your configuration data with HashiCorp Consul.
Consul is here to save your configuration management, service names and many more!
- service DNS across different OSes.
This saves us the trouble of using hosts file mappings, relying on …
Using Consul For Multiple Things Cross Organization
Easy to use and the ROI will make you a rock star!
Simple Hands on Service Discovery
Pricing
Open Source (self-managed)
$0
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Using HashiCorp Consul to connect Kubernetes clusters on Azure | Azure Friday
Consul Tutorial | Getting Started with HashiCorp Consul With Demo Session 01/04
HashiCorp Consul: Service Networking Made Easy
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Consul?
Consul boasts a fully-featured service mesh solution that solves the networking and security challenges of operating microservices and cloud infrastructure (multi-cloud and hybrid cloud).
Consul Features
- Supported: Automate service discovery
- Supported: Connect services across runtimes and cloud providers
- Supported: Enable zero-trust network security
Consul Screenshots
Consul Integrations
- Datadog
- Dynatrace
- AppDynamics
- New Relic
- Envoy Visitors
- HAProxy Community Edition
- Logz.io
- PagerDuty
- Sensu, by Sumo Logic
- VMware Aria Operations for Applications
- Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
- CloudFabrix AIOps 2.0 Solution
- Kubernetes
- NetScaler ADC
- Circonus
- Ambassador Cloud
- Solo.io Gloo Platform
- Cloudentity
- A10 Thunder ADC
- Cisco Catalyst Center
- F5 BIG-IP
Consul Competitors
Consul Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(20)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Consul, a versatile tool for service discovery and load balancing in microservices architecture, has proven to be an essential component for many organizations. With Consul, users have praised its ability to efficiently distribute traffic, ensuring the reliability and resilience of their systems. By centralizing configuration management across multiple cloud providers and on-premise environments, Consul simplifies the maintenance of configurations, making it an invaluable asset.
Another key use case of Consul lies in its distributed key/value store, which allows users to dynamically modify properties without the need for code changes or application redeployment. This feature has received positive feedback from customers as it provides flexibility and ease of use. Additionally, Consul serves as a secure data store for secret management solutions, acting as a reliable backend for Hashicorp Vault. Users have reported that this integration strengthens their infrastructure's overall security posture.
In addition to these critical use cases, Consul excels in networking tasks and service monitoring. Its functionality as a single source of truth for global key-value storage ensures consistency and reliability in configuration values. For those seeking simplified management of application configurations, Consul enables application discovery and the externalization of properties. Furthermore, it addresses the challenge of securing services across organizations by proactively identifying service interactions and aiding in issue resolution.
Overall, users appreciate how Consul offers solutions to common pain points in modern infrastructure management. Its role in service discovery, load balancing, configuration management, secret storage, and network tasks makes it a valuable tool for organizations working with microservices and distributed systems.
Ease of Integration: Users have found Consul relatively easy to operate and admire its compliance with cloud-native standards, making it seamless to integrate with other HashiCorp stacks like Nomad and Vault. They appreciate how Consul simplifies the process of connecting different services within their infrastructure.
Service Discovery: Reviewers highly value the availability of essential documentation and tutorials for all HashiCorp products, including Consul. They specifically mention that Consul stands out as one of the best service discovery tools available in the market. Its ability to be used in a polyglot architecture without being bound to any specific language is particularly highlighted.
High Availability: Many users find Consul invaluable when it comes to defining infrastructure with high availability and fault tolerance. They highlight how Consul facilitates the creation of a highly reliable infrastructure based on top of preemptible VMs, ensuring that services remain accessible even if individual nodes experience downtime or failures.
Complex network setup: Several users have found Consul's network-related setup to be complex and challenging. They have expressed difficulty in detecting issues and determining the root cause of problems, which can make troubleshooting a time-consuming process.
Lack of documentation for fine-tuning and troubleshooting: Some users have mentioned a lack of documentation for fine-tuning and troubleshooting scenarios with Consul. This can make it difficult for users to optimize their configurations or resolve issues that may arise.
Difficulties with Java SDK and auto-discovery feature: A few users have stated that Consul's SDK for Java is difficult to understand. They also mentioned that its auto-discovery feature is not as good as Eureka, another service discovery tool. Additionally, these users feel that the user interface could be improved for better usability.
Users have made several recommendations based on their experience with Consul. They have found the documentation to be helpful in providing quick assistance. Additionally, users suggest evaluating how Consul will interact with other components in the stack to ensure seamless integration. Furthermore, it is recommended to run a good cluster by preferably having one Consul instance on every (virtual) machine. Users believe that Consul is a great tool for service discovery and appreciate its simple data store feature.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)- Key-Value database management.
- Service discovery.
- Centralized configuration database with native high availability.
- Consul should have cryptography built in. Depending on other solutions for that doesn't look smart in my opinion.
- Its Frontend has space for improvements.
- Documentation also is a little poor.
- We have now an extra environment (the consul cluster) to support.
- We have now a reliable source of configuration, with special attention to the high availability feature.
- We have now a single source of truth on configuration for our applications.
- service DNS across different OSes.
This saves us the trouble of using hosts file mappings, relying on an external DNS provider and also give us a stable FQDN DNS name for our services. - global key-value store for having a "Single Source of Truth" where configuration values are written to and read from.
- Providing a service DNS
- Being a fast, stable and reliable service - a cluster of minimum 3 nodes by default
- Being a robust key-value store
- Easy to install and configure
- Extremely lightweight
- Slick and really useful web UI
- Good official documentation
- Error logs - some of the errors require Googling as you have no idea what they mean
- Misconfiguration is painful - strange errors can occur if you make even a tiny mistake
- Network mesh
- Service DNS
- Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well)
- Utility for blue-green deployments
- Service health checking
- Reliable - it never goes down by itself
- Robust - we have a lot of flexibility in defining our key-value store
- Consistent - it never gives unpredictable results
- Streamlined configuration management across multiple services
- Provided a software-defined DNS service for our software services
- Is reliable and consistent
- Negative: Was a pain if due to a misconfiguration we had to deal with error messages
Unfortunately that was a pain because of:
- Developers did not know how to persist objects effectively in MS SQL Server
- SQL queries or a custom web UI were the ways of keeping the data up to date, but both options were hard to use
- Each service would have its own slightly different configuration in a file and in MS SQL Server so that caused a lot of confusion and configuration management overhead
- Its own modern web UI
- Streamlined use of objects and multiple different configuration (JSON-based)
- Service DNS vs IP addresses is a God-send for the dev and operations teams.
Using Consul For Multiple Things Cross Organization
- Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
- K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
- API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
- Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.
- The GUI: The GUI interface for Consul has gotten a lot better over the years. Since Consul is so easy to interact with via API, this isn't a showstopper, but for those that are less command line inclined it's always nice to be able to refer them to an easy to use and understand web interface
- It's chatty: Consul is extremely chatty. Sometimes it's particularly chatty at 2am with no indication as to why and eats up quite a bit of resources. Just be sure to provision your systems that typically take a heavy load with a little extra for Consul
Easy to use and the ROI will make you a rock star!
- Consul makes keeping our DNS up to date very simple and easy.
- Configuration changes are a snap when Consul is involved.
- All of our services register easy and we sleep better knowing Consul is on the job.
- We would like to see more out of the box training for Consul use.
- Best practice examples would be nice for routing.
- The agent could be easier to run.
- Consul has paid for itself just in monitoring and keeping us notified alone.
- Configuration changes can be monitored and will make even your Security team smile.
- The time saving tools will help make even a lean IT team work like a larger force.
- Serf
Simple Hands on Service Discovery
- Quick, hands-on solution to integrate with Docker containers via Docker-machine in a Docker Swarm flavour
- Automatic provisioning of the mapped services via a dynamic API. One cannot beat that!
- Free Health Checking means by which we can assert whether a certain service is up and running or not.
- When it gracefully dies, it dies too gracefully. Way to graceful to find in a simple way what was wrong.
- Working with the ACLs could be a little simpler.
- I didn't find a native way of configuring it as a circuit breaker. Perhaps that could be an item to be improved in the future.
- It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
- Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
- For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.
- zoekeeper