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Using Consul For Multiple Things Cross Organization
August 08, 2019

Using Consul For Multiple Things Cross Organization

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Consul

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
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.
At present, I do not have any experience with interaction from Hashicorp support. That said, I'm rating them a 5 on principle because they have excellent and well thought out documentation.
Right now, I would wager to say that Consul is the best cloud agnostic solution for service health/discovery and for integrating with Vault (for obvious reasons).