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Consul

Stacks927

Followers1.1K

+ 1

Votes202

Istio

Stacks538

Followers953

+ 1

Votes41

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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.

Decisions about Consul and Istio

Prateek Mittal

Chose

Istio

over

Traefik

Kong

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

Pros of Istio

59
Great service discovery infrastructure
35
Health checking
27
Distributed key-value store
25
Monitoring
23
High-availability
11
Web-UI
10
Token-based acls
6
Gossip clustering
5
Dns server
1
Docker integration

10
Zero code for logging and monitoring
8
Service Mesh
7
Great flexibility
4
Ingress controller
3
Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker
3
Powerful authorization mechanisms
3
Full Security
3
Resiliency

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Cons of Consul

Cons of Istio

Be the first to leave a con

7
Performance

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What is Consul?

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

What is Istio?

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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Consul?

What companies use Istio?

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What tools integrate with Consul?

What tools integrate with Istio?

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What are some alternatives to Consul and Istio?

etcd

etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.

Zookeeper

A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.

SkyDNS

SkyDNS is a distributed service for announcement and discovery of services. It leverages Raft for high-availability and consensus, and utilizes DNS queries to discover available services. This is done by leveraging SRV records in DNS, with special meaning given to subdomains, priorities and weights (more info here: http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns).

Ambassador

Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

See all alternatives

Interest over time

News about Consul

MySQL HA Architecture #1 : InnoDB Cluster & Consul

(lefred.be)

Feb 19, 2018

orchestrator 3.0.3: auto provisioning raft nodes, native Consul support and more

(code.openark.org)

Nov 16, 2017

Percona Live Europe Featured Talks: Orchestrating ProxySQL with Orchestrator and Consul with Avraham Apelbaum

(www.percona.com)

Aug 31, 2017