consul VS gRPC

Compare consul vs gRPC and see what are their differences.

consul

Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure. (by hashicorp)

gRPC

The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#) (by grpc)
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consul gRPC
57 200
27,678 40,532
0.5% 1.2%
9.9 9.9
5 days ago about 4 hours ago
Go C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

consul

Posts with mentions or reviews of consul. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-23.
  • Deploy Secure Spring Boot Microservices on Amazon EKS Using Terraform and Kubernetes
    13 projects | dev.to | 23 Nov 2023
    The JHipster scaffolded sample application has a gateway application and two microservices. It uses Consul for service discovery and centralized configuration.
  • The Complete Microservices Guide
    17 projects | dev.to | 21 Sep 2023
    Service Discovery: Microservices need to discover and communicate with each other dynamically. Service discovery tools like etcd, Consul, or Kubernetes built-in service discovery mechanisms help locate and connect to microservices running on different nodes within the infrastructure.
  • Replicating and Load Balancing Go Applications in Docker Containers with Consul and Fabio
    4 projects | /r/golang | 31 May 2023
    After some research and testing, I landed on using Consul and Fabio as the demo infrastructure. Of course, there is a myriad of other options to accomplish this task, but because of the low configuration and ease of use, I was impressed with this pairing. Both projects are mature and well-supported, and very flexible--just because you can run them with low configuration, doesn't mean you have to. I wanted to keep this demo constrained, but the exercise did get me excited about exploring things further: circuit breakers, traffic splitting, and more complex service meshes.
  • Fly.io outage, recently deployed apps down, no new deployments possible
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2023
    https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/pull/12080 - this should be the Consul issue that brought down Roblox
  • Netdata release 1.38.0
    9 projects | /r/linux | 6 Feb 2023
    The Consul collector is production ready! Consul by HashiCorp is a powerful and complex identity-based networking solution, which is not trivial to monitor. We were lucky to have the assistance of HashiCorp itself in this endeavor, which resulted in a monitoring solution of exceptional quality. Look for common blog posts and announcements in the coming weeks!
  • Micro Frontends for Java Microservices
    6 projects | dev.to | 20 Jan 2023
    Changed the service discovery to Consul, since this is the default in JHipster 8.
  • I Know What You Shipped Last Summer
    5 projects | dev.to | 20 Dec 2022
    In another effort to standardize development and operations, Lob has just wrapped up our container orchestration migration from Convox to HashiCorp’s Nomad, led by Senior Platform Engineer Elijah Voigt. In this new ecosystem, one feature available to us is Consul Service Mesh (a feature of Consul, which is part of our Lob Nomad stack).
  • a tool for quickly creating web and microservice code
    28 projects | dev.to | 15 Dec 2022
    Service registry and discovery etcd, consul, nacos
  • GKE with Consul Service Mesh
    29 projects | dev.to | 3 Dec 2022
    The underlying tool Consul is very powerful, and Consul Connect service mesh on top of this tool is quite robust and extremely flexible where you can swap out the default CA for other solutions, like Vault CA, and swap out the Envoy proxy for another solution, like NGINX or HAProxy. For ingress into the cluster, you can use Consul API Gateway, or another API Gateway or an ingress controller.
  • What is the best solution to orchestrate Docker containers ?
    3 projects | /r/docker | 11 Nov 2022
    I'd like to also mention hashicorp nomad + consul. They're worth evaluating.

gRPC

Posts with mentions or reviews of gRPC. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-09.
  • Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions from Compiled Binaries
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Mar 2024
    Yes, grpc_cli tool uses essentially the same mechanism except implemented as a grpc service rather than as a stubby service. The basic principle of both is implementing the C++ proto library's DescriptorDatabase interface with cached recursive queries of (usually) the server's compiled in FileDescriptorProtos.

    See also https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/server-reflecti...

    The primary difference between what grpc does and what stubby does is that grpc uses a stream to ensure that the reflection requests all go to the same server to avoid incompatible version skew and duplicate proto transmissions. With that said, in practice version skew is rarely a problem for grpc_cli style "issue a single RPC" usecases: even if requests do go to two or more different versions of a binary that might have incompatible proto graphs, it is very common for the request and response and RPC to all be in the same proto file so you only need to make one RPC in the first place unless you're using an extension mechanism like proto2 extensions or google.protobuf.Any.

  • Delving Deeper: Enriching Microservices with Golang with CloudWeGo
    7 projects | dev.to | 22 Feb 2024
    While gRPC and Apache Thrift have served the microservice architecture well, CloudWeGo's advanced features and performance metrics set it apart as a promising open source solution for the future.
  • gRPC Name Resolution & Load Balancing on Kubernetes: Everything you need to know (and probably a bit more)
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Feb 2024
    The loadBalancingConfig is what we use in order to decide which policy to go for (round_robin in this case). This JSON representation is based on a protobuf message, then why does the name resolver returns it in the JSON format? The main reason is that loadBalancingConfig is a oneof field inside the proto message and so it can not contain values unknown to the gRPC if used in the proto format. The JSON representation does not have this requirement so we can use a custom loadBalancingConfig .
  • Dart on the Server: Exploring Server-Side Dart Technologies in 2024
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
    The Dart implementation of gRPC which puts mobile and HTTP/2 first. It's built and maintained by the Dart team. gRPC is a high-performance RPC (remote procedure call) framework that is optimized for efficient data transfer.
  • Usando Spring Boot RestClient
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
  • How to Build & Deploy Scalable Microservices with NodeJS, TypeScript and Docker || A Comprehesive Guide
    13 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2024
    gRPC is a high-performance, open-source RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework initially developed by Google. It uses Protocol Buffers for serialization and supports bidirectional streaming.
  • Actual SSH over HTTPS
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Dec 2023
    In general, tunneling through HTTP2 turns out to be a great choice. There is a RPC protocol built on top of HTTP2: gRPC[1].

    This is because HTTP2 is great at exploiting a TCP connection to transmit and receive multiple data structures concurrently - multiplexing.

    There may not be a reason to use HTTP3 however, as QUIC already provides multiplexing.

    I expect that in the future most communications will be over encrypted HTTP2 and QUIC simply because middleware creators can not resist to discriminate.

    [1] <https://grpc.io>

  • SGSG (Svelte + Go + SQLite + gRPC) - open source application
    5 projects | /r/sveltejs | 6 Dec 2023
    gRPC
  • Level UP your RDBMS Productivity in GO
    5 projects | dev.to | 5 Dec 2023
    I have decided to use gRPC because it's a very simple protocol and it's very easy to use.
  • Create Production-Ready SDKs with Goa
    9 projects | dev.to | 22 Nov 2023
    Goa generates gRPC code for you. gRPC is an efficient alternative to plain HTTP, over which you can provide your API. It requires the use of protocol buffers, made by Google. Our repository already provides the protoc app for you, in completed_app/lib.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing consul and gRPC you can also consider the following projects:

ZeroMQ - ZeroMQ core engine in C++, implements ZMTP/3.1

Apache Thrift - Apache Thrift

Cap'n Proto - Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library

zeroRPC - zerorpc for python

etcd - Distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system

rpclib - rpclib is a modern C++ msgpack-RPC server and client library

nanomsg - nanomsg library

RPyC - RPyC (Remote Python Call) - A transparent and symmetric RPC library for python

asio-grpc - Asynchronous gRPC with Asio/unified executors

Eureka - AWS Service registry for resilient mid-tier load balancing and failover.

bloomrpc - Former GUI client for gRPC services. No longer maintained.

traefik - The Cloud Native Application Proxy