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
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
$0.08
per hour
SolarWinds Kiwi CatTools
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds® Kiwi CatTools® is network automation tool designed to manage configurations on network devices such as routers, switches, and firewalls. It helps users work more efficiently by scheduling automatic backup activities and rolling out configuration changes to multiple devices at the same time. With native support for devices from dozens of manufacturers, Kiwi CatTools is designed to simplify network administration, configuration change alerting, and backup management.
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.
Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
Large-Scale Networks with Thousands of Devices that permit our enterprise with thousands of devices across multiple locations need a highly scalable solution, and A security-focused organization requires real-time monitoring of device configurations to detect and alert on unauthorized changes. and CatTools is lightweight and easy to set up, making it ideal for managing and resetting device configurations in a lab setting.
We had a few microservices that dealt with notifications and alerts. We used OpenShift to deploy these microservices, which handle and deliver notifications using publish-subscribe models.
We had to expose an API to consumers via MTLS, which was implemented using Server secret integration in OpenShift. We were then able to deploy the APIs on OpenShift with API security.
We integrated Splunk with OpenShift to view the logs of our applications and gain real-time insights into usage, as well as provide high availability.
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
I wouldn't necessarily say there is look everyday technology transform. I can see a trend wherein Red Hat OpenShift is adopting all the new technology trends and helping their customers align with their priorities and the emerging technology trends. I wouldn't call out various scope for development every day. There is scope for development. It is all how the organizations adopt it and how they deliver it to their customers. I don't want to call out there is scope for development. It's happening. It is a never ending process.
At the moment, I don't have anything to call out. We are experiencing Red Hat OpenShift and we can see every day they're coming up with new features as and when they come up with new features, we want to experience it more and more. We are looking for opportunities wherein this can be leveraged to help our users and partners.
This is the current strategy for the company, most of the products in the organisation are aligning to Openshift and various use cases it support. Also lot of applications are being developed for AI use case, openshift.AI provides opportunity to host and leverage the AI capabilities for these applications
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.
As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
CatTools is simple to set up and administer. Anyone who can install a Windows application can quickly set up an automated backup of one or more devices. It does what it was designed to do.
Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
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.
Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
The software is easy enough to set up and configure that even after using the product for years, we never had to contact support. We used some open source products before utilizing CatTools and could have used a speed dial to try and figure out the intricacies of the products.
I was not involved in the in person training, so i can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen seamlessly without any issue.
We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
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.
The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere. SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.
Strengths:Cost-Effectiveness: CatTools is significantly more affordable than enterprise-grade tools like SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) or Infoblox NetMRI. It is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses with tight budgets. Ease of Deployment: Kiwi CatTools is lightweight and easier to set up, while enterprise solutions often require substantial infrastructure and longer deployment times. Focus on Essentials: CatTools excels in its core functions, such as automated configuration backups, scheduled tasks, and essential compliance checks.
It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
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.
That is a complicated question and one that's not easy for me to answer. There's a lot of factors that go into all of the stuff that we just don't have an easy way of measuring. And we realize that while we're implementing Red Hat OpenShift, we've tried to start measuring some of that stuff, but we don't have a baseline to go on. So it's hard to say. What I can tell you is general experience with the platform has been extremely positive from the development aspect. Teams have been very, very happy with the speed at which they're able to do stuff. They've been happy with that. The way it works in one environment is exactly the way it works in the next environment because we don't have configuration drift, that type of thing, and has had very positive impacts. But we didn't have a baseline to start with. So I can't talk about getting there faster or anything like that.
