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Consul, a versatile tool for service discovery and load balancing in microservices architecture, has proven to be an essential component …
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What is Consul?
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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Pricing
Open Source (self-managed)
$0
Cloud
always free
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
Cloud
Per Hour
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
Cloud
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.hashicorp.com/products/cons…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Using HashiCorp Consul to connect Kubernetes clusters on Azure | Azure Friday
YouTube
Consul Tutorial | Getting Started with HashiCorp Consul With Demo Session 01/04
YouTube
HashiCorp Consul: Service Networking Made Easy
YouTube
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Consul?
HashiCorp Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services and across multi-cloud environments and runtimes. Consul offers service discovery, identity-based authorization, L7 traffic management, and service-to-service encryption.
Consul boasts a fully-featured service mesh solution that solves the networking and security challenges of operating microservices and cloud infrastructure (multi-cloud and hybrid cloud).
Consul boasts a fully-featured service mesh solution that solves the networking and security challenges of operating microservices and cloud infrastructure (multi-cloud and hybrid cloud).
Consul Features
- Supported: Automate service discovery
- Supported: Connect services across runtimes and cloud providers
- Supported: Enable zero-trust network security
Consul Screenshots
Consul Integrations
- Datadog
- Dynatrace
- AppDynamics
- New Relic
- Envoy Visitors
- HAProxy Community Edition
- Logz.io
- PagerDuty
- Sensu, by Sumo Logic
- VMware Aria Operations for Applications
- Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
- CloudFabrix AIOps 2.0 Solution
- Kubernetes
- NetScaler ADC
- Circonus
- Ambassador Cloud
- Solo.io Gloo Platform
- Cloudentity
- A10 Thunder ADC
- Cisco Catalyst Center
- F5 BIG-IP
Consul Competitors
Consul Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
The most common users of Consul are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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- Pros
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- Recommendations
Consul, a versatile tool for service discovery and load balancing in microservices architecture, has proven to be an essential component for many organizations. With Consul, users have praised its ability to efficiently distribute traffic, ensuring the reliability and resilience of their systems. By centralizing configuration management across multiple cloud providers and on-premise environments, Consul simplifies the maintenance of configurations, making it an invaluable asset.
Another key use case of Consul lies in its distributed key/value store, which allows users to dynamically modify properties without the need for code changes or application redeployment. This feature has received positive feedback from customers as it provides flexibility and ease of use. Additionally, Consul serves as a secure data store for secret management solutions, acting as a reliable backend for Hashicorp Vault. Users have reported that this integration strengthens their infrastructure's overall security posture.
In addition to these critical use cases, Consul excels in networking tasks and service monitoring. Its functionality as a single source of truth for global key-value storage ensures consistency and reliability in configuration values. For those seeking simplified management of application configurations, Consul enables application discovery and the externalization of properties. Furthermore, it addresses the challenge of securing services across organizations by proactively identifying service interactions and aiding in issue resolution.
Overall, users appreciate how Consul offers solutions to common pain points in modern infrastructure management. Its role in service discovery, load balancing, configuration management, secret storage, and network tasks makes it a valuable tool for organizations working with microservices and distributed systems.
Ease of Integration: Users have found Consul relatively easy to operate and admire its compliance with cloud-native standards, making it seamless to integrate with other HashiCorp stacks like Nomad and Vault. They appreciate how Consul simplifies the process of connecting different services within their infrastructure.
Service Discovery: Reviewers highly value the availability of essential documentation and tutorials for all HashiCorp products, including Consul. They specifically mention that Consul stands out as one of the best service discovery tools available in the market. Its ability to be used in a polyglot architecture without being bound to any specific language is particularly highlighted.
High Availability: Many users find Consul invaluable when it comes to defining infrastructure with high availability and fault tolerance. They highlight how Consul facilitates the creation of a highly reliable infrastructure based on top of preemptible VMs, ensuring that services remain accessible even if individual nodes experience downtime or failures.
Complex network setup: Several users have found Consul's network-related setup to be complex and challenging. They have expressed difficulty in detecting issues and determining the root cause of problems, which can make troubleshooting a time-consuming process.
Lack of documentation for fine-tuning and troubleshooting: Some users have mentioned a lack of documentation for fine-tuning and troubleshooting scenarios with Consul. This can make it difficult for users to optimize their configurations or resolve issues that may arise.
Difficulties with Java SDK and auto-discovery feature: A few users have stated that Consul's SDK for Java is difficult to understand. They also mentioned that its auto-discovery feature is not as good as Eureka, another service discovery tool. Additionally, these users feel that the user interface could be improved for better usability.
Users have made several recommendations based on their experience with Consul. They have found the documentation to be helpful in providing quick assistance. Additionally, users suggest evaluating how Consul will interact with other components in the stack to ensure seamless integration. Furthermore, it is recommended to run a good cluster by preferably having one Consul instance on every (virtual) machine. Users believe that Consul is a great tool for service discovery and appreciate its simple data store feature.
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Reviews
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August 08, 2019
Using Consul For Multiple Things Cross Organization
Consul is currently being used at our company across multiple teams in both development and operations. We use Consul as a back-end for Vault, we use Consul as a means to do service discovery and health checks, and we also use the Consul K/V store to coordinate runs of our configuration management platform, Chef.
- 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.
- 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