Likelihood to Recommend 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 Spinnaker suits well for applications which are stateless and can adapt to an immutable architecture of deployment. But for applications which are stateful and cannot afford to spin up new servers for every deployment doesn't go well with Spinnaker. It can handle only deployments which are VM based and cannot support deployments to serverless architecture like AWS Lambda etc.
Read full review Pros Key-Value database management. Service discovery. Centralized configuration database with native high availability. Read full review Fast deployments. Can be integrated with a good variety of other products. Also provides some insights from your environment. Read full review Cons 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 It does NOT support CFN based deployments Windows based systems finds it difficult to onboard to Spinnaker. Pipeline level access authorisation is not there. Support for EBS volume encryption is probably missing. Attach/detach EBS volumes during deployments is difficult. No support to deploy the artifacts without re-creating the servers. Only pure immutable deployment are allowed. Open-source - so good and bad! Spinnaker on its own has 10 underlying micro services. Managing Spinnaker needs a focussed platform approach. User authentication is easy but authorisation management is not straight forward. Debajit Kataki Sr. Devops Mgr. ( Tools, automations , Release Engineering/ CICD , AWS )
Read full review Usability 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 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 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 • Pipeline Expressiveness • Self-Service/Override • Visibility of Client Teams • Operability of Client Teams - • High-Quality Integrations (AWS, IHP, Google) • Extensibility – (Ability to add code) • The maturity of Deployment Process • Speed/Ease of Onboarding
Read full review Return on Investment 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 By using Spinnaker we are able to deploy new versions of our product quickly. A deployment takes in average 2 minutes. Our investment on Spinnaker was just time learning it. Read full review ScreenShots