Consul

Score9.6 out of 10

20 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HashiCorp Consul are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Ease of Integration: Users have found Consul relatively easy to operate and admire its compliance with cloud-native standards, making it seamless to integrate with other HashiCorp stacks like Nomad and Vault. They appreciate how Consul simplifies the process of connecting different services within their infrastructure.

Service Discovery: Reviewers highly value the availability of essential documentation and tutorials for all HashiCorp products, including Consul. They specifically mention that Consul stands out as one of the best service discovery tools available in the market. Its ability to be used in a polyglot architecture without being bound to any specific language is particularly highlighted.

High Availability: Many users find Consul invaluable when it comes to defining infrastructure with high availability and fault tolerance. They highlight how Consul facilitates the creation of a highly reliable infrastructure based on top of preemptible VMs, ensuring that services remain accessible even if individual nodes experience downtime or failures.

Reviews

5 Reviews

Consul is here to save your configuration management, service names and many more!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 7, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Consul for 2 primary purposes:

service DNS across different OSes.
This saves us the trouble of using hosts file mappings, relying on an external DNS provider and also give us a stable FQDN DNS name for our services.
global key-value store for having a "Single Source of Truth" where configuration values are written to and read from.

Pros

Providing a service DNS
Being a fast, stable and reliable service - a cluster of minimum 3 nodes by default
Being a robust key-value store
Easy to install and configure
Extremely lightweight
Slick and really useful web UI
Good official documentation

Cons

Error logs - some of the errors require Googling as you have no idea what they mean
Misconfiguration is painful - strange errors can occur if you make even a tiny mistake

Likelihood to Recommend

Consul can provide a light-weight, lightning-fast and robust solution for the following:

Network mesh
Service DNS
Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well)
Utility for blue-green deployments
Service health checking

Consul can be used in any or a combination of these scenarios. Regardless if you are a network administrator or a regular software engineer, Consul can add value to your work.

Borislav Traykov

DevOps Team Leader in Engineering at Cognyte (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Build a strong layer to handle your configuration data with HashiCorp Consul.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I've been using Hiera as a database for my puppet deployments for years, specifically by using encrypted Hiera, but this year I had to create a new environment and I have decided to try something more robust. My logical choice was to look for something well established on DevOps ecosystem. I've heard a lot about HashiCorp Consul and I have decided to try it. Now, Consul is my official key-value solution being reliable and efficient making me confident mainly about high availability.

Pros

Key-Value database management.
Service discovery.
Centralized configuration database with native high availability.

Cons

Consul should have cryptography built in. Depending on other solutions for that doesn't look smart in my opinion.
Its Frontend has space for improvements.
Documentation also is a little poor.

Likelihood to Recommend

Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.

Erlon Sousa Pinheiro

Senior Devops Engineer in Information Technology at SOTI (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Using Consul For Multiple Things Cross Organization

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 8, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Consul is currently being used at our company across multiple teams in both development and operations. We use Consul as a back-end for Vault, we use Consul as a means to do service discovery and health checks, and we also use the Consul K/V store to coordinate runs of our configuration management platform, Chef.

Pros

Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.

Cons

The GUI: The GUI interface for Consul has gotten a lot better over the years. Since Consul is so easy to interact with via API, this isn't a showstopper, but for those that are less command line inclined it's always nice to be able to refer them to an easy to use and understand web interface
It's chatty: Consul is extremely chatty. Sometimes it's particularly chatty at 2am with no indication as to why and eats up quite a bit of resources. Just be sure to provision your systems that typically take a heavy load with a little extra for Consul

Likelihood to Recommend

Right now, I would wager to say that Consul is the best cloud agnostic solution for service health/discovery and for integrating with Vault (for obvious reasons).

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Easy to use and the ROI will make you a rock star!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 18, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Consul is being used by the IT department to help create efficiencies across the company. Because we are a multi-data center environment we rely on Consul's monitoring to keep us alerted properly. Our DNS and services get a big boost while making our engineer's jobs easier. I highly recommend this product for any IT department.

Pros

Consul makes keeping our DNS up to date very simple and easy.
Configuration changes are a snap when Consul is involved.
All of our services register easy and we sleep better knowing Consul is on the job.

Cons

We would like to see more out of the box training for Consul use.
Best practice examples would be nice for routing.
The agent could be easier to run.

Likelihood to Recommend

Consul is well suited for both SMB as well as enterprise environments. I have found it to be a robust scalable tool to help make our company more efficient. Consul excels in a single database or a multi-database environment which makes searches easier. Small businesses might find this a bit overkill as a product but it can still benefit them.

Eric Krueger

Operations/Systems Manager in Information Technology at Crowell Systems (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Simple Hands on Service Discovery

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 15, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Consul as our service discovery to provide load balancing decisions on our swarm of containers, distributed throughout our clients' servers, as well as our servers. The DevOps team is the responsible for leveraging our Consul instances, maintaining them and keeping them communicable with all our nodes in a real time fashion.

Pros

Quick, hands-on solution to integrate with Docker containers via Docker-machine in a Docker Swarm flavour
Automatic provisioning of the mapped services via a dynamic API. One cannot beat that!
Free Health Checking means by which we can assert whether a certain service is up and running or not.

Cons

When it gracefully dies, it dies too gracefully. Way to graceful to find in a simple way what was wrong.
Working with the ACLs could be a little simpler.
I didn't find a native way of configuring it as a circuit breaker. Perhaps that could be an item to be improved in the future.

Likelihood to Recommend

I've been using Consul as my only service discovery tool for my Swarm of Nodes, deployed with Docker. Also, as a side effect, it provides me a great health checking tool for my node services. I didn't need to to much configuration, pretty much the stock Consul docker image ran almost out of the box, without much hassle, which in this aspect, is a basic characteristics of Consul.

Claudio Fernando Maciel

Sr. Software Developer in Research & Development at CONSLOG - Construction Software (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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