1. Home
  2. Service Mesh Platforms
  3. Consul Reviews
  4. User Review of Consul
Build a strong layer to handle your configuration data with HashiCorp Consul.
Updated August 11, 2022

Build a strong layer to handle your configuration data with HashiCorp Consul.

Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with 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 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.
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.

Do you think HashiCorp Consul delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with HashiCorp Consul's feature set?

Yes

Did HashiCorp Consul live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of HashiCorp Consul go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy HashiCorp Consul again?

Yes

Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.