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Consul vs Redis: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown document provides a comparison between Consul and Redis, outlining the key differences between the two technologies.

  1. Consul Service Discovery: Consul is primarily designed as a service discovery tool, allowing services to be registered and discovered within a distributed system. It provides a DNS interface, health checks, and flexible service discovery mechanisms. Redis, on the other hand, is not specifically built for service discovery but rather as an in-memory data store and cache.

  2. Data Persistence: Redis offers data persistence through various mechanisms, including snapshots and AOF (Append-Only File). It supports both key-value pair storage and complex data structures. Consul, on the other hand, does not provide native options for data persistence. It focuses on storing and managing metadata related to service discovery and configuration.

  3. Consistency Model: Redis provides a strongly consistent data model, where updates are applied in a sequential and ordered manner. It supports atomic operations on data and ensures that the state is always consistent. Consul, on the other hand, offers eventual consistency, where updates may take some time to propagate across the system. It relies on a gossip protocol for maintaining consistency, which introduces a certain level of inconsistency during updates.

  4. Data Replication: Redis supports various replication mechanisms, including master-slave replication and Redis Cluster, allowing data to be distributed and replicated across multiple nodes. Consul, on the other hand, utilizes a strongly consistent gossip protocol for distributing metadata and maintaining consistency within the cluster.

  5. Additional Features: Redis offers a wide range of additional features, such as pub/sub messaging, Lua scripting, and transactions, making it suitable for use cases beyond data storage and caching. Consul, on the other hand, provides features like distributed key-value storage, service mesh integration, and health checking that are specifically focused on service discovery and networking.

  6. Scalability: Redis is known for its high-performance and scalability, capable of handling millions of requests per second. It can be horizontally scaled by adding more nodes to the cluster. Consul, although designed for scalability and fault-tolerance, may have limitations in terms of performance and scalability due to the additional overhead introduced by the service discovery mechanisms.

In Summary, Consul and Redis differ in their primary purpose and features. Consul focuses on service discovery and handling distributed systems, while Redis is primarily used as an in-memory data store and cache, with additional features like pub/sub messaging and transactions.

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Pros of Consul
Pros of Redis
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
  • 12
    Web-UI
  • 10
    Token-based acls
  • 6
    Gossip clustering
  • 5
    Dns server
  • 4
    Not Java
  • 1
    Docker integration
  • 1
    Javascript
  • 886
    Performance
  • 542
    Super fast
  • 513
    Ease of use
  • 444
    In-memory cache
  • 324
    Advanced key-value cache
  • 194
    Open source
  • 182
    Easy to deploy
  • 164
    Stable
  • 155
    Free
  • 121
    Fast
  • 42
    High-Performance
  • 40
    High Availability
  • 35
    Data Structures
  • 32
    Very Scalable
  • 24
    Replication
  • 22
    Great community
  • 22
    Pub/Sub
  • 19
    "NoSQL" key-value data store
  • 16
    Hashes
  • 13
    Sets
  • 11
    Sorted Sets
  • 10
    NoSQL
  • 10
    Lists
  • 9
    Async replication
  • 9
    BSD licensed
  • 8
    Bitmaps
  • 8
    Integrates super easy with Sidekiq for Rails background
  • 7
    Keys with a limited time-to-live
  • 7
    Open Source
  • 6
    Lua scripting
  • 6
    Strings
  • 5
    Awesomeness for Free
  • 5
    Hyperloglogs
  • 4
    Transactions
  • 4
    Outstanding performance
  • 4
    Runs server side LUA
  • 4
    LRU eviction of keys
  • 4
    Feature Rich
  • 4
    Written in ANSI C
  • 4
    Networked
  • 3
    Data structure server
  • 3
    Performance & ease of use
  • 2
    Dont save data if no subscribers are found
  • 2
    Automatic failover
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Temporarily kept on disk
  • 2
    Scalable
  • 2
    Existing Laravel Integration
  • 2
    Channels concept
  • 2
    Object [key/value] size each 500 MB
  • 2
    Simple

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Cons of Consul
Cons of Redis
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 15
      Cannot query objects directly
    • 3
      No secondary indexes for non-numeric data types
    • 1
      No WAL

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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 Redis?

    Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.

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    What companies use Consul?
    What companies use Redis?
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    What tools integrate with Consul?
    What tools integrate with Redis?

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    What are some alternatives to Consul and Redis?
    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