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Consul vs linkerd: 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, linkerd is detailed as "Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices". linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.
Consul belongs to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack, while linkerd can be primarily classified under "Microservices 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, linkerd provides the following key features:
- Adaptive load-balancing
- Fine-grained instrumentation
- Abstractions over service discovery
Consul and linkerd are both open source tools. It seems that Consul with 16.2K GitHub stars and 2.82K forks on GitHub has more adoption than linkerd with 5K GitHub stars and 499 GitHub forks.
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 linkerd
- CNCF Project3
- Service Mesh1
- Fast Integration1
- Pre-check permissions1
- Light Weight1