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.
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JBoss SOA Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Red Hat JBoss SOA Platform drives business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in an open platform. It delivers what the vendor describes as an easy-to-consume service-oriented architecture (SOA) integration suite that lets users build, deploy, integrate, and orchestrate applications and services.
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.
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is great when you are looking at building more or less pure Java applications and SOA micro-services that may integrate with multiple external data sources. It is less useful when you are looking to build simple SOA applications that are simple in nature since the overhead associated with deploying as well as learning BPEL.
JBoss is open source so the cost overhead to deploy and build application is very low.
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and its parent Redhat are reputed and well adapted in the industry so it is easy to find best practices documentation for complex deployments of JBoss middleware.
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
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is dependent and build for JEE/Java application so using a different programming paradigm will be much harder.
There is still a learning curve to get familiar with BPEL making it harder to get an SOA micro-service up and running compared to a fully cloud-based service
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.
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.
Redhat support generally is great and that is true for the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform as well. Even if you do not buy support from Redhat, you can reply on the discussion board and bug fixes via the open-source JBoss without much trouble.
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.
Oracle SOA Suite (Oracle BPM + Oracle BPEL + other components) and IBM WebSphere middleware is most costly and suited if you are already using applications and other middleware components from these vendors. Mulesoft (Salesforce Mule ESB) is best when you need deep integration with one of Salesforce's existing products. JBoss and Apache Web Server are best when you do not want to invest infant CapEx/OpEx on license fee. Apache Web Server based middleware is best for simple SOA applications.
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.
