#1 most frequent
United States of America
55.8%724 installations of 1,297
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.
Categories & Use Cases
Media
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Who Buys & Uses HashiCorp Consul
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
6.7%87 installations of 1,297
#3 most frequent
France
4.5%58 installations of 1,297
Build a strong layer to handle your configuration data with HashiCorp Consul.
Pros
- Key-Value database management.
- Service discovery.
- Centralized configuration database with native high availability.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Other Software Used
Spinnaker, Datadog, Kubernetes
Consul is here to save your configuration management, service names and many more!
Pros
- 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
Cons
- 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
Most Important Features
- 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
Return on Investment
- 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
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft SQL Server
Other Software Used
Jenkins, Terraform, by HashiCorp, Google Kubernetes Engine
Easy to use and the ROI will make you a rock star!
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Alternatives Considered
Serf
Other Software Used
Nagios, McAfee Enterprise Security Manager, Trend Micro OfficeScan
Simple Hands on Service Discovery
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Alternatives Considered
zoekeeper
Other Software Used
Chef, Puppet Data Center Automation
Using Consul For Multiple Things Cross Organization
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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
Usability
Other Software Used
HashiCorp Vault, Chef, ServiceNow, Terraform, Jenkins
