HashiCorp Consul Reviews

I perform infrastructure provisioning and many other activities across different cloud providers. HashiCorp Terraform is a very useful tool for tracking resources. We use HashiCorp Vault and HashiCorp Terraform as ideal tools to provision infrastructure in the cloud using simple code. HashiCorp Enterprise Cloud helps us store the state file, which is a great utility for us. When using HashiCorp Enterprise Cloud for Terraform provisioning, we can provision resources even though some errors may be occurring with different resources without any stopper or show stopper. I can provision new resources even though existing errors persist, which is one of the great features from my perspective.

For API capability to integrate with other models, we are planning to integrate it, but I did not have any exposure yet. We had a discovery that we need to use the API endpoint to integrate with our existing AI model so that any provisioning can be automated with the AI itself.

When I have different environments, I can store variables using HashiCorp Consul. Consider that I'm using the same code for all environments. Using KMS value, I can use the same code in a different environment, which means I'm variablizing it. Only the prod and dev naming conventions may change, nothing more than that. When I'm using this KMS, I can integrate with the same code and re-provision it in any environment.

HashiCorp Terraform and Vault are ideal tools for provisioning infrastructure in the cloud using simple code. HashiCorp Enterprise Cloud helps store the state file, enabling resource provisioning even with existing errors.

HashiCorp Consul provides a good interface for storing datasets, viewing state files, and tracking runs. It allows creation of custom Terraform modules, making it a valuable interface for many DevOps tasks.

KMS storage allows variablizing code, preventing hardcoding, and enhancing security by restricting what others can see. This is crucial for managing variables across different environments.

Integration of security scanning tools with HashiCorp ensures vulnerability detection and pipeline protection, offering observability into whether the code is ready for deployment and tracking historical metrics.

They can provide user IAM features, such as identity and access management, allowing more granular access control for DevOps engineers and developers. This would enable better management of engineering access, aligning with industry norms.

For HashiCorp's enterprise solutions, offering free trials or credits could encourage adoption among larger companies, particularly those that view the cost as a barrier to entry. Improved promotions could boost sales and exposure.

Customer service response time could be improved, especially for non-production environments, to provide quicker support and resolution of inquiries.

I have been using this solution for around four years.

They are having a partnership with HashiCorp.

Negative

I sourced this directly from the official HashiCorp side. Earlier, I was working for one of the clients called Yatra. They are also using HashiCorp, but they use it directly from the GCP marketplace.

There is no competition for HashiCorp Terraform. It is the only Infrastructure as a Code tool in the current market. There are other tools such as Ansible, which is configuration management, but that is nowhere related to infrastructure in the way HashiCorp does.

Currently, there is no alternative for using Terraform since people use IaC; HashiCorp is the only primary utility for all around the world.

As you know, HashiCorp is not open source; it is an enterprise offering. They can provide a free trial account with limited credits for startups or many companies. There are big giant companies around India, such as media-centric companies, and they are paying a lot of money for Akamai, GCP, and many other services, but they are not going to use HashiCorp because it is a paid offering. Also, it is very expensive. However, if they come to know that there are some free credits available, these big giant companies with exposure to it will definitely purchase the enterprise offering because it is helping and minimizing manpower at one end. It is a cakewalk for any DevOps to provision any kind of infrastructure with the existing modules without any error or code-related issues. You can provision easily. So this can be improved on the sales end or the promotion end by providing free credit or free trial accounts.

KMS store, or key-value store, allows us to variablize it. We do not want others to look at what we have hardcoded or anything else. It's a great security tool.

We are integrating some security scanning tools with HashiCorp Consul. Whenever the developer or DevOps provisions any infrastructure, if there are any vulnerabilities or if a secret is being passed directly, the security breaks the provisioning or stops the provisioning and breaks the pipeline. This observability shows whether the code is good to deploy or if it is bad code or if there is anything that needs to be changed. It also has the previous history of metrics and values so that management can directly track whether any pre-security vulnerabilities are being deployed. Whenever I want to provision or explore something new, this helps me understand what is going to happen. With a new offering, we definitely do not know what is going to come. When we integrate with observability and security scanning, it will directly block us if it does not meet security norms, and there will be an error message stating that. Then I can understand and find a different approach to it.

I did not integrate it with the Vault.

I would rate this product overall as an 8.5 out of 10.

My main use case for HashiCorp Consul is for multiple features. In my current organization, we are using it to provide a distributed system with servers, agents, client agents, control plane, and data plane. We are using this in an on-premise environment, and it has good scalability and strengthens the whole environment. This is similar to Kong Connect which I already worked with earlier, but HashiCorp Consul is specifically a distributed solution.

When I work with HashiCorp Consul in a normal week, the first thing I'm usually doing is managing the KVs, which are the knowledge base articles. We are also using this for microservices, serverless, and service mesh solutions. What it does is help us to connect, find, and secure communication between the services or applications. We have user services, order services, payment services, and inventory services. What HashiCorp Consul does is eliminate the need to find everything manually. Instead, we use HashiCorp Consul and it provides all the information when we need it.

HashiCorp Consul has had a positive impact on my organization so far because it really helped fix issues. When we are doing troubleshooting, it is very easy to troubleshoot if there are any issues, missing components, or gaps. From the deployment perspective, I would not say that this is a positive impact because deployment is not that easy. The setup is not that easy and is somewhat complex because it is not user-friendly. You cannot do research for one or two days and then directly deploy it. You need proper learning and it is not beginner-friendly. From the deployment or setup side, I would say it is a bit more complex compared to other tools. However, once it is available and set up, then it is easy to use. We can easily use it and it provides a strong microservice and service mesh platform.

When considering the best features of HashiCorp Consul for my use case, I would say the features include strong service discovery. It is a solution for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud ready. It is highly scalable and has a built-in service mesh solution. From the security standpoint, it supports ACLs. Additionally, it integrates well with the HashiCorp stack, which includes Terraform and Vault that we are already using. That is a positive point.

The biggest friction point and frustration I have encountered with HashiCorp Consul so far is what I already highlighted in our previous discussion. First of all, this is not beginner-friendly. We need good learning and proper training to understand the concepts and the architecture. Another part is the deployment or the setup, which is not that easy and is somewhat complex. Another thing I can think of is the UI or interface which we get with HashiCorp Consul. It is not that polished or user-friendly. So it looks somewhat chatty. Another part is that to go with HashiCorp Consul, you need to have a good and strong understanding of DevOps. Otherwise, you will not be able to manage it, deploy it, or use it.

If I could improve one thing about HashiCorp Consul, the single change that would have the biggest positive impact on my workflow would be that the UI has better visibility and is more user-friendly. That would really help my team to manage it because if it provides a good understanding and good overview of the service mesh and the details, that would be much better.

We are still exploring the other components.

Before adopting HashiCorp Consul, we were using Istio for service discovery and secure service-to-service communication. Istio is the open-source solution and we tried with the free open-source license-based product. With the help of Istio, we were managing the services, the service mesh, and the whole solution itself. Initially, we used Istio. Now we are relying on HashiCorp Consul.

When I first implemented HashiCorp Consul in my environment, it took some time to get everything up and running because we had to go through particular training to adopt HashiCorp Consul. It took some time to understand the concepts and the terminologies. It requires training to understand all the aspects of HashiCorp Consul, such as its architecture, how it works, and what the components are. HashiCorp Consul architecture is server-based and client-based agents. The key components include a service registry, internal health checks, and a key-value store. Mostly we use this for service mesh as well.

Regarding looking at any other tools or approaches, we did not look for the tools you mentioned, but we did try Kong for a different project. For that other project, we used Kong Connect. Before going for HashiCorp Consul, we used some inbuilt solution provided by the Red Hat OpenShift platform as a service mesh solution. However, we could not find that working that well. So we moved to HashiCorp Consul because it provides good scalability, good performance, and from the monitoring standpoint, it is also good. Another part I can think of is the integration and the good ecosystem it has. In our current setup, we have OpenShift clusters and Vault as well. We are also using HashiCorp Vault and have integrated with Terraform. All the deployments and infrastructure as code solutions we are doing with the help of Terraform. This is a good choice and good solution for us for my current project.

HashiCorp Consul is not company-wide used in my organization today. I think only one or two departments are using it. We have developers who are using it, and we have infrastructure people who are managing the clusters and are also using it. So it is not widely used in my organization, but some of the departments are using this tool.

I would rate HashiCorp Consul overall as an eight out of ten because it is somewhat complex to understand and from the deployment perspective.

My advice to someone considering HashiCorp Consul who has a workflow similar to mine is that this is a good tool we are using for our service mesh and service discovery. It is not bad to give it a try, so I think you should always give it a try. You can compare it with other tools, but we did the comparison with Istio and some other things, so we prefer it very much. So maybe you can just give it a try. It provides almost all the features including scalability, service discovery, health monitoring solutions, and internal health checks. It is a good solution for service discovery and service mesh and I recommend giving it a try.

My main use case for HashiCorp Consul is Service Discovery with the Consul Template. I also use HashiCorp Consul as the storage backend for Vault, and in the future, I am considering a microservice that is related to the Service Mesh.

For the service discovery using HashiCorp Consul, I have three Nginx servers that are integrated with VIP management that I set up with Corosync and Pacemaker. At the same time, I also set up the HashiCorp Consul server for three servers in the same Nginx server, and then all of the upstream servers also install the HashiCorp Consul agent and join into the server. After that, I use the Consul Template to do some health checks. If one of our services is going down, it should be removed from the upstream and reload the Nginx service.

For my current main use case with HashiCorp Consul, one more important aspect is how I use Vault with the HashiCorp Consul storage backend. Since I don't care about what happens if something goes wrong in my Vault server because the storage backend is already stored in HashiCorp Consul, and since I have good experience with HashiCorp Consul, I can manage the HashiCorp Consul storage backend as well, and it is well-managed.

On a day-to-day basis, I am always relying on the HashiCorp Consul Service Discovery as a production server. Also, Vault with the storage backend is in production, and I am still considering Service Mesh because I may need to take some time to restructure our microservices, so I will consider Service Mesh in the future.

The best features HashiCorp Consul offers are Service Mesh, the storage backend, and Service Discovery.

Using HashiCorp Consul saves time because it helps me a lot with the automation of my infrastructure. My platform and DevOps teams have four members, but since we have an automation mindset, we can do a lot with a few people by using HashiCorp Terraform and HashiCorp Consul, because automation tools help us tremendously.

The outcomes I have seen with HashiCorp Consul are faster recovery, and it is also easy for the management team because we can automate it with the automated upstream. I experience almost no downtime.

I hope HashiCorp Consul can have the Autopilot in the community version, if possible. I was considering whether HashiCorp Consul servers should have a non-voter feature where they should only have some standby nodes that should not be able to be a voter. I understand that this might be an Enterprise version feature, but if it was in the community version, it would be very beneficial for me.

I have been using HashiCorp Consul for about six years. At my first company, I used HashiCorp Consul integrated with Nginx to automate the Consul Template with a dynamic upstream.

HashiCorp Consul is stable. I always use the binary package and customize my systemd. One important note is that I always use the binary instead of the yum update or apt update because I am concerned about different versions when I try something from the Red Hat or Ubuntu repositories. I customize my systemd and use the binary package, and HashiCorp Consul should be stable because I want all the clusters to have the same version of HashiCorp Consul.

HashiCorp Consul's scalability requires understanding the quorum base, and I understand the quorum base. For example, if you want to start a HashiCorp Consul server, you should start from three, five, or seven servers, and if you want to scale, you should understand this.

Before choosing HashiCorp Consul, I did not evaluate other options, as I preferred HashiCorp Consul as the first option.

HashiCorp Consul is deployed in my organization on-premises, and I use Ansible to deploy HashiCorp Consul.

I have no experience with the pricing and licensing of HashiCorp Consul since I mostly use the community version.

My advice to others looking at using HashiCorp Consul is that if you want your system to be stable with a dynamic upstream, you should go with HashiCorp Consul. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

My main use case for HashiCorp Consul is a proof of concept. I am trying to see how HashiCorp Consul enables our developers.

One of the best features HashiCorp Consul offers is access for our developers. HashiCorp Consul is making it easier for developers, but we have limited use cases at the moment. Since we are still in the proof of concept phase with HashiCorp Consul, I am not able to say exactly how it has impacted my organization positively, but it should help our applications talk to each other better. We are looking for our applications to communicate more easily without having to define IP addresses and other configuration details.

I think the documentation sometimes can be better; it needs to make it easier for our developers to understand how to interact with it. At this time, I do not think there are any other improvements HashiCorp Consul could use besides the documentation.

I have been using HashiCorp Consul for less than a year.

HashiCorp Consul is stable in my experience so far.

HashiCorp Consul is scaling great; I think we are seeing exactly what we need for communication, so it is scaling wonderfully.

I have not interacted with customer support yet.

I have not used any other solution previously.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been adequate so far; we have yet to fully purchase at this time.

It is too early to tell if I have seen a return on investment yet.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been adequate so far; we have yet to fully purchase at this time.

I have not evaluated anyone else before choosing HashiCorp Consul.

I would appreciate clarification on what advice I should give to others looking into using HashiCorp Consul. I gave this review a rating of 8.

My main use case for HashiCorp Consul is configuration.

The best features that HashiCorp Consul offers for me include service discovery, which I appreciate most because it automatically tracks all the services. After that, I appreciate the health checkup, which gives me real-time updates. Third is the multiple data center support, which supports multiple data centers.

HashiCorp Consul has positively impacted my organization as it saves time through the discovery feature. It automatically discovers all the services, which helps me save time. Service mesh provides TLS security, which supports zero trust networking, and this was a basic requirement for my use. Third is cost optimization, as the prices are very effective for customers deploying HashiCorp Consul.

I currently do not have any issues with HashiCorp Consul, but it could be better if it enables ACL automatically. There are cases where it stops running without any proper security and does not give notification. Enabling the access control list would allow it to work properly.

I have been familiar with HashiCorp Consul for the last one year.

In configuring HashiCorp Consul, I basically install it from the official website. Then, I use the best command. After that, I access the web console. After the web console, I put the command and run it. After that, I secure the console and use the firewall port, though I do not remember the port number.

HashiCorp Consul has the best features and is a reliable tool that is cost-efficient and provides many excellent features, including real-time tracking of services. My company uses the product normally, depending on the customer requirement. I would rate HashiCorp Consul a nine out of ten because, as I mentioned previously, I appreciate the services it provides. It is very reliable, cost-efficient, and tracks all my services in real-time. It enables TLS security and has many features, all of which lead me to this rating.

My main use case for HashiCorp Consul is that we use it as a registry and a health checker and as a service mesh, and we store our configurations in a key-value store and secrets.

A quick specific example of how we use HashiCorp Consul for service mesh or health checks in my environment is that we store our secrets, keys, certificate values, companies, and client secrets in HashiCorp Consul.

The best features HashiCorp Consul offers are that it provides a key-value store, service mesh, health checking, and service discovery.

Out of those features, the key-value store and health checking have made the biggest difference for my team because we mostly use the key-value store, and that key-value store has really impacted our product and our use case for storing and keeping our secrets and configurations there.

HashiCorp Consul has impacted my organization positively because of the key-value store, service discovery, service mesh, and health checking. It has provided a one-in-all solution for us and a centralized solution, so because of that, we don't need to navigate much and we can get many things in one place.

HashiCorp Consul can be improved as it can provide some required management such as managing a cluster, certificate, or networking. It can be made easier in a service mesh, and sometimes it is not usable for small apps and the UI is a little confusing, so in those cases, it could improve.

I have been using HashiCorp Consul for about six or seven months.

HashiCorp Consul is stable, but it can be improved.

HashiCorp Consul's scalability is good.

We haven't used any solution before HashiCorp Consul.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I am not aware of licensing as that is not my subject. Regarding setup, it is easy; you just need to follow the documentation from HashiCorp Consul. Regarding pricing, we are currently using the free tier and we are considering pricing options right now.

I have seen a return on investment as time is saved because of those features. Regarding money, we are not paying right now.

We haven't evaluated any other options before choosing HashiCorp Consul.

My advice to others looking into using HashiCorp Consul is that they can use it if they want to store their credentials, configurations, and need service discovery and many other features in one place.

I found this interview good and I do not think anything needs to change for the future. I gave this review a rating of eight.

My main use case for HashiCorp Consul is service discovery with NGINX dynamic upstream and also Vault integrated with Consul as a storage backend.

The best features of HashiCorp Consul for my environment are service discovery and backend storage with Vault. I rely on both the most and find them very important.

HashiCorp Consul has reduced downtime and made automation possible for my environment. Vault is acting as a very important role, so we always consider Consul storage as essential.

If I could add or improve one thing in HashiCorp Consul, I would prefer a non-voter feature.

I have been familiar with HashiCorp Consul for six years.

Before I adopted HashiCorp Consul, I was using direct configuration on NGINX for service discovery. However, when something went wrong on the upstream, it was not really helpful. With HashiCorp Consul, we have dynamic upstream capabilities, and if one of the nodes fails a health check, it removes from the upstream. This is very helpful for my operations.

When I first set up HashiCorp Consul in my environment, I spent about one week to understand the basics. However, if I want to deploy a Consul server with something like my current environment now, I should spend about one or two hours.

Some advice from me is that if you want your infrastructure fully automated, you should prefer HashiCorp Consul as the first option. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

I use the solution for service discovery and orchestration. We have a lot of microservices architecture.

The solution is useful for performing health checks of the applications and services. The documentation is good.

Health check outputs are delayed sometimes. If a service is down for more than five or ten seconds, sometimes the tool is not able to capture it.

I have been using the solution for more than four to five years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The tool’s stability is good. I rate the stability a nine out of ten. We had some issues. Sometimes, health checks do not give the right outcome.

The tool’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. We have not faced any issues in scaling the server. We run the server behind an autoscaling group. Our backup and restore mechanism is very strong. Specific teams in our organization that follow the microservices architecture use the solution a lot. We have less than 20 users.

We were planning to use Istio. Another team in our organization was using Envoy. We were already using the enterprise version of Terraform. So, we decided to use Consul.

The initial setup is moderately easy. I do the configuration using Chef. We deploy the solution on Amazon EC2 instances. Everything is automated. We spent some time in the HA setup. Other than that, it doesn’t take much time.

I take care of the infrastructure. I use Chef for configuration management. I work on multiple technologies. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The primary use case for HashiCorp Consul is in a microservices architecture, particularly within a premium application involving various streaming services like Kafka.

The product's most valuable features are support for Service Mesh TLS and canary deployment.

They could improve issues related to triggering generic deployments for the platform. We have raised multiple support cases. They could enhance the integration approach with Service Mesh tools. Additionally, the UI needs enhancement.

We have been using HashiCorp Consul for 13 months.

The platform is stable. However, it needs maintenance and monitoring as it sometimes encounters downtime.

We have implemented the product in two of our projects.

The feedback provided by the technical support team doesn't resolve the issue.

Compared to other products, HashiCorp Consul is more flexible to use.

The platform is easy to install when integrated with Kubernetes. The ideal setup includes running three workers or additional nodes for data persistence, especially when Consul is deployed in an on-premises environment. Even when deploying on EKS, the reports run smoothly as scheduled shifts.

In case of budget constraints, we opt for the product's business support licenses and use an open-source version. However, it is advisable to go for the enterprise edition.

I recommend HashiCorp Consul for beginners. It is a stable tool. The key-vault storage feature has significantly enhanced our configuration management process. We have maintained the secret software applications in the vault and retrieved the information from Kv.

I rate the product a seven out of ten. It is good open-source software to be managed within the production.

HashiCorp Consul's most valuable feature is the automation of many processes, which limits the errors from user interaction. 

The command line of HashiCorp Consul could be more intuitive to make it easier to use.

I have been using HashiCorp Consul for approximately two years.

HashiCorp Consul has been stable since our first installation.

The scalability of the HashiCorp Consul is good.

We have approximately 200 people in my organization using this solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

I found the initial implementation of HashiCorp Consul straightforward.

We have a team that does the maintenance of the solution.

I would advise others to try out HashiCorp Consul and run a test environment first to see if it meets their needs.

I rate HashiCorp Consul an eight out of ten.