Likelihood to Recommend Ambassador is really well suited for scenarios were you need to give power and freedom to your developers so they can take advantage of the self-service approach. One of the few scenarios I can not recommend using Ambassador is in the case you are planning to not using Kubernetes as it is a solution designed to work specifically on that platform
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Simple syntax Easy to understand Easy to install Read full review Key-Value database management. Service discovery. Centralized configuration database with native high availability. Read full review Cons Documentation is not updated Implementing external authentication doesn't always work as described in the documentation The Administration console is limited Read full review 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 Read full review Usability It's great! it's amazingly simple to use and the best part is the self-service approach. I also like how easy it is to add a new route to a endpoint with the mappings definition.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating Overall the support has been great and quick to answer the requests I've submitted in the past. I was originally using the community/open source version and I can't say it was the best experience I had, it wasn't terrible but it wasn't great. I believe the biggest issue was that they refer to the documentation a lot but the documentation isn't updated regularly so I feel it's lagging behind the most recent versions.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered They both offer about the same in terms of end goal and purpose of use and scenarios. However, Ambassador does way better in terms of simplifying the syntax and makes offer a little bit more of control by adding the concepts of hosts, mappings while staying away from a hard to read single file configuration.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Reduced downtime by redirecting traffic between DC. Reduced engineering time, don't have to dedicate 1 person to manage it. Increased training costs in the short term. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots