Bitbucket Server (discontinued) vs. HashiCorp Consul

Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) is suitable for departments or teams with the capacity to manage and support their own products and the availability to implement the tool on their own infrastructure. Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) enables a good framework based on git to integrate the development cycle and to handle anything from a minor group of users and repositories to an extended usage with multiple users and roles collaborating in different projects.

Incentivized

Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.

Incentivized

• Projects & Permissions - Stash keeps you and your developers productive by providing a way to structure your repositories and manage permissions via a simple, yet powerful user interface. Stash is very easy to use, manage & administer.
• Essentially Stash gives two versions of interfaces to work with.
• Stash Repository hosted on a server.
• Atlassian SourceTree.
• Atlassian Sourcetree is a tool to work with a code in stash. The two 'web' and 'desktop' versions make working with code user friendly, intuitive and comprehensive.
• Connectivity to JIRA - Stash keeps track of all issues associated with commits. Users can use Stash to quickly see all issues associated with a commit, or use the Source tab on JIRA issues for an aggregate view of all the code changes that are related to a specific JIRA issue. With this information available, your development team saves time when tracking particular bug fixes or improvements.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• You can't allow users to create new repositories without them being full admins of a whole project
• There's not a way to limit who can merge a pull request (e.g. allow only the author to merge) outside of branch permissions
• Some settings like default reviewers can't be easily copied to different repositories (without setting default reviewers at the project level, which we don't want to do because a single project has multiple team's code under it)

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

Because we're so locked in, it's likely we'll be using Bitbucket Server for a while, unfortunately.

Incentivized

The usability of its interface is pretty straight forward when it comes to creating projects and repositories, but when you have to dive into finer grained portions of the UI things can get tricky. If you are used to using tools like GitHub or Gitlab -- Bitbucket is just different enough to be a bother.

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

Never really needed any support as the application is very easy to set up and maintain. Any questions we had were well documented in their online documentation, and community forum.

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

We migrated several of our applications to BitBucket from legacy Team Foundation Server, and the experience has been significantly better. It's easy to use and plenty flexible. Other solutions such as GitHub are also good, but we needed to keep everything on-prem due to constraints around our industry and company, though we are currently re-evaluating whether we can move to something cloud based in the future.

Incentivized

We used to use Microsoft SQL Server for configuration management of our services. Unfortunately that was a pain because of:

• Developers did not know how to persist objects effectively in MS SQL Server
• SQL queries or a custom web UI were the ways of keeping the data up to date, but both options were hard to use
• Each service would have its own slightly different configuration in a file and in MS SQL Server so that caused a lot of confusion and configuration management overhead

Consul brought the following benefits:

• Its own modern web UI
• Streamlined use of objects and multiple different configuration (JSON-based)
• Service DNS vs IP addresses is a God-send for the dev and operations teams.

Incentivized

• In positive form, having Stash over not having it at all has provided us with a superior repository system over trying to push to some local server instance and manage branches/merging from our local machines.
• There are no real negatives to using Stash, its only problem is that there are competitors out there that can offer additional features.

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