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
OpenText AccuRev
Score 4.3 out of 10
N/A
AccuRev, a software configuration management offering, is now owned and supported by Micro Focus since the December 2013 acquisition, and now by OpenText.
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.
Very slow and not intuitive; it would be my last choice for version control systems.The UI is a little confusing at times and seems a little outdated. It needs a lot of improvement. It is suited for small projects and fewer number of projects. But if there are huge projects and many projects to be maintained in a portfolio, its a little hard to manage.
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
Ability to zoom in/out for stream-view. We currently have many streams/substreams and unable to view the entire workflow. Zooming in/out would benefit.
Being a designer, I use Adobe Flash and SWF files. When updating the SWF files, Accurev does not see these files as being changed and you will be unable to promote. In order to push changes, you must totally rename the SWF file.
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.
Consul was easier to configure out of the box than Serf and gave us more initial options. Its easy to use tools and support were by far superior to Serf in many ways. Support alone was one of those areas that Serf could take an example from Consul to keep its customers happy.
In my view, accurev ranks very low compared to other tools I have used. Microsoft TFS is the best in the industry as of today as it's a complete ALM solution. It does code version, bug tracking, user story documentation, and has easy integration with other external tools supporting many languages. So I would definitely recommend TFS to anyone.
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.
