AWS App Mesh vs. HashiCorp Consul vs. Traefik

If your workloads are primarily based on AWS infrastrucure, where you might have EC2, EKS, Cloud Watch solutions, this service is native and good for you to maintain application level metworking. Also if you want to assess how secure inter service traffic could be achieved without a lot of custom writing, AWS App Mesh is a fine solution.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Standardization of microservices communication.
• Traceability and visibility of communication across microservices.
• Identify and Isolate issues in microservices communication.
• Monitoring and sending data to CloudWatch.

Incentivized

• Key-Value database management.
• Service discovery.
• Centralized configuration database with native high availability.

Incentivized

• Complex setup and configuration - should provide a simplified onboarding process.
• There is no RBAC style policies, which could improve security and control
• No native rate limiting and circuit breaking.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

We rated AWS App Mesh as part of a comparison with Microsoft Azure AKS + Istio. While we rated its usability 6/10, recognizing its strengths in AWS-native integration, the difficult learning curve and limited flexibility made it less appealing for broader use. Also AWS announced the retirement of AWS App Mesh by the end of this year.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Istio is high on operational costs as compared to AppMesh. HIgher learning curve for Istio as compared to AppMesh. Multi cluster support in AWS. App Mesh has IAM integration which is a plus for AWS workloads.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• High ROI as it facilitates operational monitoring and root cause analysis.
• Ensures to re-route and distribute traffic sustaining operational availability and performance - +ve for ROI.
• Service discovery enables service run time governance - +ve for ROI.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized