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.
$0
always free
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides the Managed Istio installation add on, designed to provide additonal control over clusters and the microservices they comprise via automatic updates and lifecycle management of control plane components, and integration with platform logging and monitoring tools.
N/A
Pricing
HashiCorp Consul
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Editions & Modules
Open Source (self-managed)
$0
always free
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
Per Hour
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Consul
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HashiCorp Consul
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Features
HashiCorp Consul
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.
It is a perfect application when you have multiple users and/or developers and you want to create rules and standards for access and the ability to change access levels. The reporting of usage is good, but adding more granularity into the metrics that have been used to measure are not specific enough. They provide detail but drilling into the detail would be more appropriate i.e. access to the baseline data.
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.
Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.
I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
We used to use Microsoft SQL Server for configuration management of our services. 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
Consul brought the following benefits:
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.
1) One-stop solution for all the complex network connectivity managed by [IBM Cloud Managed Istio]. 2) Nice dashboard to understand the flow. 3) Easy to troubleshoot the service if any one of the APIs is not responding. 4) We can integrate it with Azure Kubernetes service and other cloud provider Kubernetes services. 5) Monitoring the health of the pods can be easily configured and alerts can be triggered very accurately with this tool.
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.
