HashiCorp Consul vs. IBM DevOps Code ClearCase vs. IBM Integration Bus

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

IBM Rational ClearCase might be better suited for a smaller / simpler code base. Larger code bases really slow it down... but then again there are better alternatives out there for source control

Incentivized

Routing, protocol transformation, message transformation and service aggregation are very well performed by WebSphere Message Broker (WMB). It is not very suitable for integration with databases.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Rational ClearCase is excellent for handling versioning and branching. No other tool I've used has the depth that ClearCase has when it comes to handling complex branching scenarios and identifying where certain versions of particular files are within a particular configuration.
• Rational ClearCase handles parallel development of many dependent applications really well.
• The use of ClearCase Views to switch between projects and configurations is extremely convenient as opposed to the local workstation model of the competitors.

Incentivized

• Graphical data mapper
• Support for different programming languages
• Integration with MQ
• Support for different parsers

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

• Extremely buggy.
• Sometimes the repository gets locked for no reason.
• Slow.

Incentivized

• Logging
• Debugging
• Code quality tools
• Feature specific installation

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

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

If development is centrallized to one location and your company releases hundreds of customized versions of your software per year, then ClearCase is the best tool for managing the complexity of multiple versions of customized software. If your company has globally distributed development, then I'd recommend Team Foundation Server over ClearCase. If your organization uses Agile Methodologies, then I'd recommend TFS with GIT.

Incentivized

Websphere message broker supports a lot more protocols than any other similar tool.

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

• Managed code versioning for many years.
• Only one person can edit code at a time - slows processing down.
• IBM is an expensive product to support.

Incentivized

• It helped us in improving the speed to market for our services/APIs.
• Learning curve is quite long

Incentivized