AWS OpsWorks vs. HashiCorp Consul

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS OpsWorks
Score 4.7 out of 10
N/A
AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.N/A
Consul
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
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
Pricing
AWS OpsWorksHashiCorp Consul
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Open Source (self-managed)
$0
always free
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
Per Hour
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS OpsWorksConsul
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
AWS OpsWorksHashiCorp Consul
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Vagrant
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 9.9 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS OpsWorksHashiCorp Consul
Likelihood to Recommend
6.0
(3 ratings)
8.1
(5 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
6.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS OpsWorksHashiCorp Consul
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Where you already have some Chef recipes to build your application boxes and are happy to run directly on VMs, OpsWorks really shines. It won't do anything too complex for you, so it only really works well for simple stacks (load balancers, application layers, database layers). If you want to do more complex infrastructure, Cloudformation or Terraform are probably worth looking at.
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HashiCorp
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.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • connect between serveral AWS services (EC2, RDS, ELB)
  • easy configuration management deployment via Chef
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HashiCorp
  • Key-Value database management.
  • Service discovery.
  • Centralized configuration database with native high availability.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Getting up and running with OpsWorks is a very technical and potentially time-consuming process. You need to know the ins and outs of Chef/Puppet if you really want to get into it and there isn't a convenient way to test out the environment locally so debugging can be time-consuming.
  • To take advantage of some of the newer AWS instance types you need to be running on a VPC, which again is a pain if you don't have a DevOps team.
  • The error logs and monitoring metrics in OpsWorks are pretty basic and haven't changed much over the years.
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HashiCorp
  • 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
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Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
HashiCorp
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.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
Unless you pay for a pricey support package getting support on OpsWorks will be pretty slow. Documentation is also relatively limited and sometimes hard to follow when compared to competitors. Generally, we've been able to get the answers we need from OpsWorks support when we run into problems but don't expect rapid responses.
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HashiCorp
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the other services on offer from AWS, it is good to use as a stepping stone along the way when building your systems - or perhaps it would be entirely suitable for a fairly simple project.
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HashiCorp
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.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • very quick way of creating new infrastructure
  • low maintenance costs
  • easy to create high availability setups thus reducing costs
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HashiCorp
  • 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.
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ScreenShots

Consul Screenshots

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