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Consul vs Vault: What are the differences?

Consul and Vault are two popular tools developed by HashiCorp that serve different purposes in the realm of infrastructure management and security. Let's explore the key differences between the two:

  1. Purpose and Functionality: Consul focuses on enabling service discovery and networking functionalities within a distributed system. It provides a robust platform for service registration, health checking, distributed key-value storage, and multi-datacenter communication. In contrast, Vault is specifically built to address the security concerns of sensitive data within an infrastructure. It offers secure secret management, encryption as a service, dynamic secrets, and access control capabilities.

  2. Use Case: Consul is commonly used in scenarios where there is a need for automatic service registration and discovery, load balancing, and failure detection in a distributed environment. It is often utilized in microservices architectures or containerized applications. On the other hand, Vault is utilized to secure sensitive data and manage secrets across different applications, services, or infrastructure components. Its use cases span across secure cloud migrations, secret rotation, database credential management, and more.

  3. Key Features: Consul provides features like DNS-based service discovery, advanced health checking, key-value storage, service mesh integration, and distributed configuration management. It also offers powerful networking functionalities like service segmentation and load balancing. In contrast, Vault offers features like centralized secret management, dynamic secrets, transit encryption, secure key generation and rotation, cryptographic operations, and access control policies.

  4. Security Focus: While both Consul and Vault have security-related features, their main focus differs. Consul offers built-in security mechanisms such as TLS encryption, ACLs (Access Control Lists), and secure gossip protocol to ensure secure communication between nodes. However, Vault's primary focus is on securing and managing sensitive data within the infrastructure. It uses various encryption techniques, provides secure storage for secrets, and allows fine-grained access control and auditing.

  5. Integration and Ecosystem: Consul integrates well with various platforms, frameworks, and cloud providers. It works seamlessly with popular container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, supports service mesh architectures like Istio, and can be easily integrated with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or GCP. In contrast, Vault integrates with authentication providers, databases, cloud platforms, and existing infrastructure components. It can handle dynamic secrets for databases, integrate with LDAP or OAuth, and provide encryption as a service for applications.

  6. Open Source vs. Enterprise Edition: Consul is available as an open-source tool with a vibrant community, and the core functionality is free to use. However, HashiCorp also offers a commercial enterprise edition called Consul Enterprise, which provides additional features and support for large-scale deployments. On the other hand, Vault is available in both open-source and enterprise editions, with the enterprise version offering advanced features like HSM (Hardware Security Module) integration, replication, and advanced audit logs.

In summary, Consul focuses on service discovery and networking aspects, while Vault excels in secure secret management and data protection. However, both tools can be used together to enhance the overall security and reliability of an infrastructure.

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Pros of Consul
Pros of Vault
  • 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
  • 16
    Secure
  • 12
    Variety of Secret Backends
  • 11
    Very easy to set up and use
  • 8
    Dynamic secret generation
  • 5
    AuditLog
  • 3
    Leasing and Renewal
  • 3
    Privilege Access Management
  • 2
    Variety of Auth Backends
  • 2
    Easy to integrate with
  • 2
    Open Source
  • 2
    Consol integration
  • 2
    Handles secret sprawl
  • 1
    Multicloud

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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 Vault?

Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

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What companies use Consul?
What companies use Vault?
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What are some alternatives to Consul and Vault?
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