Build a strong layer to handle your configuration data with HashiCorp Consul.
I've been using Hiera as a database for my puppet deployments for years, specifically by using encrypted Hiera, but this year I had to …
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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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Open Source (self-managed)
$0
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always free
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
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Per Hour
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
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Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
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- 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
- Logz.io
- PagerDuty
- Sensu, by Sumo Logic
- VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront
- 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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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
I've been using Hiera as a database for my puppet deployments for years, specifically by using encrypted Hiera, but this year I had to create a new environment and I have decided to try something more robust. My logical choice was to look for something well established on DevOps ecosystem. I've heard a lot about HashiCorp Consul and I have decided to try it. Now, Consul is my official key-value solution being reliable and efficient making me confident mainly about high availability.
- Key-Value database management.
- Service discovery.
- Centralized configuration database with native high availability.
- Consul should have cryptography built in. Depending on other solutions for that doesn't look smart in my opinion.
- Its Frontend has space for improvements.
- Documentation also is a little poor.
- We have now an extra environment (the consul cluster) to support.
- We have now a reliable source of configuration, with special attention to the high availability feature.
- We have now a single source of truth on configuration for our applications.
We used and evaluated solutions like AWS KMS, etcd, regular config files spread out by puppet, etc. Consul was the best option through our tests. Still a product with huge room for improvement, but like the other HashiCorp products it is a valuable product to support your environment. Even with room for improvement, I consider it a reliable and stable product.
We use Consul for 2 primary purposes:
- service DNS across different OSes.
This saves us the trouble of using hosts file mappings, relying on an external DNS provider and also give us a stable FQDN DNS name for our services. - global key-value store for having a "Single Source of Truth" where configuration values are written to and read from.
- Providing a service DNS
- Being a fast, stable and reliable service - a cluster of minimum 3 nodes by default
- Being a robust key-value store
- Easy to install and configure
- Extremely lightweight
- Slick and really useful web UI
- Good official documentation
- Error logs - some of the errors require Googling as you have no idea what they mean
- Misconfiguration is painful - strange errors can occur if you make even a tiny mistake
- Reliable - it never goes down by itself
- Robust - we have a lot of flexibility in defining our key-value store
- Consistent - it never gives unpredictable results
- Streamlined configuration management across multiple services
- Provided a software-defined DNS service for our software services
- Is reliable and consistent
- Negative: Was a pain if due to a misconfiguration we had to deal with error messages
We used to use Microsoft SQL Server for configuration management of our services.
Unfortunately that was a pain because of:
Unfortunately that was a pain because of:
- Developers did not know how to persist objects effectively in MS SQL Server
- SQL queries or a custom web UI were the ways of keeping the data up to date, but both options were hard to use
- Each service would have its own slightly different configuration in a file and in MS SQL Server so that caused a lot of confusion and configuration management overhead
- Its own modern web UI
- Streamlined use of objects and multiple different configuration (JSON-based)
- Service DNS vs IP addresses is a God-send for the dev and operations teams.
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
January 18, 2018
Easy to use and the ROI will make you a rock star!
Consul is being used by the IT department to help create efficiencies across the company. Because we are a multi-data center environment we rely on Consul's monitoring to keep us alerted properly. Our DNS and services get a big boost while making our engineer's jobs easier. I highly recommend this product for any IT department.
- Consul makes keeping our DNS up to date very simple and easy.
- Configuration changes are a snap when Consul is involved.
- All of our services register easy and we sleep better knowing Consul is on the job.
- We would like to see more out of the box training for Consul use.
- Best practice examples would be nice for routing.
- The agent could be easier to run.
- Consul has paid for itself just in monitoring and keeping us notified alone.
- Configuration changes can be monitored and will make even your Security team smile.
- The time saving tools will help make even a lean IT team work like a larger force.
- Serf
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.
6
Our whole IT department has been cross trained. By making this tool available to our whole department it has made everyone's jobs easier. The fact that we can make things more efficient while saving hard dollars is a win all around. Management likes the ROI they see from the initial investment.
February 15, 2017
Simple Hands on Service Discovery
We are using Consul as our service discovery to provide load balancing decisions on our swarm of containers, distributed throughout our clients' servers, as well as our servers. The DevOps team is the responsible for leveraging our Consul instances, maintaining them and keeping them communicable with all our nodes in a real time fashion.
- Quick, hands-on solution to integrate with Docker containers via Docker-machine in a Docker Swarm flavour
- Automatic provisioning of the mapped services via a dynamic API. One cannot beat that!
- Free Health Checking means by which we can assert whether a certain service is up and running or not.
- When it gracefully dies, it dies too gracefully. Way to graceful to find in a simple way what was wrong.
- Working with the ACLs could be a little simpler.
- I didn't find a native way of configuring it as a circuit breaker. Perhaps that could be an item to be improved in the future.
- 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.
- zoekeeper
We studied Zoekeeper, trying to decide which could become our service broker tool of choice. But although it is meant to be a very high performance tool, it got immensely shadowed by the vast plethora of available tools that Consul offers. The monitoring, health checking tools, as well as the key-value data storage and gossip clustering functionalities just could not be beaten.