TrustRadius Insights for HashiCorp Consul are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
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.
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Consul Reviews
2 Reviews
Engineering
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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.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
Consul can provide a light-weight, lightning-fast and robust solution for the following:
Network mesh
Service DNS
Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well)
Utility for blue-green deployments
Service health checking
Consul can be used in any or a combination of these scenarios. Regardless if you are a network administrator or a regular software engineer, Consul can add value to your work.
Consul is currently being used at our company across multiple teams in both development and operations. We use Consul as a back-end for Vault, we use Consul as a means to do service discovery and health checks, and we also use the Consul K/V store to coordinate runs of our configuration management platform, Chef.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
Right now, I would wager to say that Consul is the best cloud agnostic solution for service health/discovery and for integrating with Vault (for obvious reasons).
