Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Consul: What are the differences?
Amazon EC2 Container Service: Container management service that supports Docker containers. Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles; Consul: A tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration. Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
Amazon EC2 Container Service and Consul are primarily classified as "Containers as a Service" and "Open Source Service Discovery" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 Container Service are:
- Docker Compatibility
- Managed Clusters
- Programmatic Control
On the other hand, Consul provides the following key features:
- Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.
- Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.
- Key/Value Storage - A flexible key/value store enables storing dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.
"Backed by amazon" is the top reason why over 97 developers like Amazon EC2 Container Service, while over 49 developers mention "Great service discovery infrastructure" as the leading cause for choosing Consul.
Consul is an open source tool with 16.4K GitHub stars and 2.85K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Consul's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon EC2 Container Service has a broader approval, being mentioned in 794 company stacks & 391 developers stacks; compared to Consul, which is listed in 134 company stacks and 55 developer stacks.
