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Consul vs Istio: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is Istio? Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices, by Google, IBM, and Lyft. Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.
Consul belongs to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack, while Istio can be primarily classified under "Microservices Tools".
"Great service discovery infrastructure" is the primary reason why developers consider Consul over the competitors, whereas "Zero code for logging and monitoring" was stated as the key factor in picking Istio.
Consul and Istio are both open source tools. Istio with 18.5K GitHub stars and 3.1K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Consul with 16.4K GitHub stars and 2.85K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Consul has a broader approval, being mentioned in 134 company stacks & 55 developers stacks; compared to Istio, which is listed in 32 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.
Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.
Pros of Consul
- Great service discovery infrastructure58
- Health checking35
- Distributed key-value store27
- Monitoring26
- High-availability23
- Web-UI12
- Token-based acls10
- Gossip clustering6
- Dns server5
- Not Java3
- Docker integration1
Pros of Istio
- Zero code for logging and monitoring13
- Service Mesh8
- Great flexibility7
- Powerful authorization mechanisms4
- Ingress controller4
- Full Security3
- Resiliency3
- Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker3
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Cons of Consul
Cons of Istio
- Performance15
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What is Consul?
What is Istio?
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