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Consul

Consul

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Consul, a versatile tool for service discovery and load balancing in microservices architecture, has proven to be an essential component …
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Pricing

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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
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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
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Product Details

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 Features

  • Supported: Automate service discovery
  • Supported: Connect services across runtimes and cloud providers
  • Supported: Enable zero-trust network security

Consul Screenshots

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Consul Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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.

Traefik, NGINX, and Apache ZooKeeper are common alternatives for Consul.

The most common users of Consul are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(20)

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!

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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