consul VS istio

Compare consul vs istio 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)
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consul istio
57 86
27,678 34,650
0.5% 1.1%
9.9 10.0
5 days ago 6 days ago
Go Go
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.

istio

Posts with mentions or reviews of istio. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.
  • Optimal JMX Exposure Strategy for Kubernetes Multi-Node Architecture
    2 projects | dev.to | 27 Mar 2024
    Leverage a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd to manage communication between microservices within the Kubernetes cluster. These service meshes can be configured to intercept JMX traffic and enforce access control policies. Benefits:
  • Open Source Ascendant: The Transformation of Software Development in 2024
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024
    Open Source and Cloud Computing: A Match Made in Heaven The cloud is accelerating OSS adoption. Cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes [https://kubernetes.io/] and Istio [https://istio.io/], both open-source projects, are revolutionizing how applications are built and deployed across cloud platforms.
  • Delving Deeper: Enriching Microservices with Golang with CloudWeGo
    7 projects | dev.to | 22 Feb 2024
    Consider the case of Bookinfo, a sample application provided by Istio, rewritten using CloudWeGo's Kitex for superior performance and extensibility.
  • How to Build & Deploy Scalable Microservices with NodeJS, TypeScript and Docker || A Comprehesive Guide
    13 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2024
    It is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication, providing features like load balancing, encryption, authentication, and monitoring. Istio deploys sidecar proxies alongside each microservice instance. These proxies handle communication, providing features like load balancing, service discovery, encryption, monitoring and authentication.
  • Caddy for Certs and Istio for Reverse Proxy
    2 projects | /r/kubernetes | 1 Dec 2023
    5Y old post that sounds like they've done similar here: Caddy Issue Istio Issue but doesn't cover much of the implementation
  • Developer’s Guide to Building Kubernetes Cloud Apps ☁️🚀
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Oct 2023
    In a production environment there will be a load balancer setup with an Ingress Controller, Service Mesh or some type of Custom Router. This allows all traffic to be sent to the single load balancer IP address and then route the traffic to a service based on the Domain name or subpath. We are using a NGINX ingress controller but service meshes like Istio have been becoming the most popular solution to use as they offer more segmentation, security and granular control.
  • Progressive Delivery on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using Flagger with Istio and FluxCD
    5 projects | dev.to | 26 Sep 2023
    Flagger is a progressive delivery tool that enables a Kubernetes operator to automate the promotion or rollback of deployments based on metrics analysis. It supports a variety of metrics including Prometheus, Datadog, and New Relic to name a few. It also works well with Istio service mesh, and can implement progressive traffic splitting between primary and canary releases.
  • Implementing TLS in Kubernetes
    13 projects | dev.to | 1 Aug 2023
    End-to-end data encryption with a service mesh: Using an end-to-end data encryption mechanism with a service mesh like Istio, TLS can secure communication between different microservices within a Kubernetes cluster. This is a popular approach for modern, distributed microservice architectures.
  • Ultimate EKS Baseline Cluster: Part 1 - Provision EKS
    17 projects | dev.to | 21 Jul 2023
    From here, we can explore other developments and tutorials on Kubernetes, such as o11y or observability (PLG, ELK, ELF, TICK, Jaeger, Pyroscope), service mesh (Linkerd, Istio, NSM, Consul Connect, Cillium), and progressive delivery (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Spinnaker).
  • Istio moved to CNCF Graduation stage
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2023
    If something doesn't play nice try the Istio slack or file an issue on the main repo: https://github.com/istio/istio

What are some alternatives?

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

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

osm - Open Service Mesh (OSM) is a lightweight, extensible, cloud native service mesh that allows users to uniformly manage, secure, and get out-of-the-box observability features for highly dynamic microservice environments.

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

keda - KEDA is a Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling component. It provides event driven scale for any container running in Kubernetes

traefik - The Cloud Native Application Proxy

anthos-service-mesh-packages - Packaged configuration for setting up a Kubernetes cluster with Anthos Service Mesh features enabled

Caddy - Fast and extensible multi-platform HTTP/1-2-3 web server with automatic HTTPS

Apache ZooKeeper - Apache ZooKeeper

kubernetes - Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management

crossplane - The Cloud Native Control Plane

minio - The Object Store for AI Data Infrastructure

falco - Cloud Native Runtime Security