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Consul vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?
Developers describe Consul as "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. On the other hand, Kubernetes is detailed as "Manage a cluster of Linux containers as a single system to accelerate Dev and simplify Ops". 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.
Consul belongs to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack, while Kubernetes can be primarily classified under "Container Tools".
Some of the features offered by Consul are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Kubernetes provides the following key features:
- Lightweight, simple and accessible
- Built for a multi-cloud world, public, private or hybrid
- Highly modular, designed so that all of its components are easily swappable
"Great service discovery infrastructure" is the top reason why over 49 developers like Consul, while over 131 developers mention "Leading docker container management solution" as the leading cause for choosing Kubernetes.
Consul and Kubernetes are both open source tools. It seems that Kubernetes with 54.2K GitHub stars and 18.8K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Consul with 16.2K GitHub stars and 2.82K GitHub forks.
Slack, Shopify, and Starbucks are some of the popular companies that use Kubernetes, whereas Consul is used by Slack, SendGrid, and Oscar Health. Kubernetes has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1017 company stacks & 1060 developers stacks; compared to Consul, which is listed in 131 company stacks and 52 developer stacks.
We develop rapidly with docker-compose orchestrated services, however, for production - we utilise the very best ideas that Kubernetes has to offer: SCALE! We can scale when needed, setting a maximum and minimum level of nodes for each application layer - scaling only when the load balancer needs it. This allowed us to reduce our devops costs by 40% whilst also maintaining an SLA of 99.87%.
Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
Pros of Consul
- Great service discovery infrastructure60
- Health checking35
- Distributed key-value store29
- Monitoring26
- High-availability23
- Web-UI12
- Token-based acls10
- Gossip clustering6
- Dns server5
- Not Java3
- Docker integration1
Pros of Kubernetes
- Leading docker container management solution164
- Simple and powerful128
- Open source106
- Backed by google76
- The right abstractions58
- Scale services25
- Replication controller20
- Permission managment11
- Cheap8
- Supports autoscaling8
- Simple8
- No cloud platform lock-in5
- Reliable5
- Self-healing5
- Quick cloud setup4
- Promotes modern/good infrascture practice4
- Scalable4
- Open, powerful, stable4
- Runs on azure3
- Captain of Container Ship3
- Cloud Agnostic3
- Custom and extensibility3
- Backed by Red Hat3
- A self healing environment with rich metadata3
- Gke2
- Everything of CaaS2
- Sfg2
- Expandable2
- Golang2
- Easy setup2
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Cons of Consul
Cons of Kubernetes
- Poor workflow for development15
- Steep learning curve15
- Orchestrates only infrastructure8
- High resource requirements for on-prem clusters4
- Too heavy for simple systems2
- Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)1
- More moving parts to secure1
- Additional Technology Overhead1
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