Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Consul VS Google Kubernetes Engine

Compare Consul VS Google Kubernetes Engine and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Consul logo Consul

Consul is a solution for service discovery and configuration.

Google Kubernetes Engine logo Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine is a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system for running your Docker containers. Set up a cluster in minutes.
  • Consul Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-18
  • Google Kubernetes Engine Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-05

Consul features and specs

  • Service Discovery
    Consul provides robust service discovery features, allowing services to automatically register and deregister themselves, thus enabling automatic detection of service availability within an infrastructure.
  • Health Checking
    Consul supports both static and dynamic health checks, enabling proactive monitoring and automated responses to service health changes to ensure reliability and uptime.
  • Key/Value Store
    Consul includes a distributed, highly available key/value store suitable for dynamic configuration, feature flagging, and more, providing flexibility in application configuration management.
  • Multi-Datacenter Support
    Consul has built-in support for multi-datacenter configurations, making it a versatile option for organizations with complex, distributed architectures.
  • Secure Communication
    Consul ensures secure communication between services through mutual TLS encryption, promoting improved security and confidentiality across the network.
  • Consul Connect
    With Consul Connect, Consul offers a service mesh solution, allowing for secure service-to-service communication with automatic mTLS and identity-based authorization.

Possible disadvantages of Consul

  • Initial Setup Complexity
    Setting up Consul can be complex, especially in large, multi-datacenter environments, requiring a good understanding of distributed systems and networking.
  • Resource Intensive
    For larger implementations with many nodes and services, Consul can become resource-intensive, demanding significant CPU and memory resources, which can increase operational costs.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Consul's comprehensive feature set comes with a steep learning curve, which may pose a challenge for teams unfamiliar with service mesh or infrastructure management.
  • Requires Additional Tools for UI
    The default user interface provided by Consul is minimalistic, necessitating integration with other tools to build more comprehensive dashboards and visualizations.
  • Potential for Network Bottlenecks
    In complex deployments, especially with multiple datacenters, network latency and bottlenecks can arise, potentially impacting service discovery and health check performance.

Google Kubernetes Engine features and specs

  • Managed Service
    GKE is a fully managed service, which means Google takes care of tasks like provisioning, maintenance, and updates of the cluster, reducing the operational burden on users.
  • Scalability
    GKE offers robust scalability options, allowing you to easily scale your applications up or down based on demand. This is facilitated through auto-scaling features for both nodes and pods.
  • Integration with Google Cloud Services
    GKE integrates seamlessly with other Google Cloud services such as Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and more, providing a streamlined experience for leveraging multiple cloud tools.
  • Security
    GKE offers advanced security features like private clusters, and integrates with Google Cloud IAM, which allows for fine-grained access control, helping to secure your Kubernetes environment.
  • Ease of Use
    GKE's comprehensive dashboard, command-line interface, and supporting documentation make it easy to deploy, manage, and monitor Kubernetes clusters.
  • Global Reach
    With GKE, you can deploy clusters across multiple regions and zones, giving you the ability to build highly available, geographically dispersed applications.

Possible disadvantages of Google Kubernetes Engine

  • Cost
    While GKE offers extensive features, it can be more expensive compared to other Kubernetes solutions, especially when additional services and high-availability features are utilized.
  • Limited Customization
    As a managed service, GKE has some limitations in terms of customization and control over the underlying infrastructure compared to self-managed Kubernetes environments.
  • Complexity
    Despite its ease of use features, GKE still requires a certain level of expertise to efficiently manage Kubernetes clusters, which can be a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Dependence on Google Cloud
    Using GKE ties you to the Google Cloud ecosystem, which may limit flexibility if you decide to migrate to a different cloud provider or adopt a multi-cloud strategy.
  • Resource Constraints
    Like all cloud services, GKE nodes can be subject to resource limits and quotas imposed by Google Cloud, which can impact performance if not properly managed.
  • SLA and Downtime
    While Google Cloud offers Service Level Agreements (SLAs), there is still a risk of downtime which could affect your applications. Additionally, relying on a third-party provider means issues may take time to resolve.

Consul videos

Church’s Consul in Polished Binder Odd Width - 12 Months Review

More videos:

  • Review - Review da Cervejeira Consul Mais + Consumo de energia e medidas
  • Review - Cervejeira Consul Vale a Pena? Review e Opinião

Google Kubernetes Engine videos

Getting Started with Containers and Google Kubernetes Engine (Cloud Next '18)

More videos:

  • Review - Optimize cost to performance on Google Kubernetes Engine
  • Tutorial - Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) | Coupon: UDEMYSEP20 - Kubernetes Made Easy | Kubernetes Tutorial

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Consul and Google Kubernetes Engine)
Help Desk
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
IT Service Management
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Computing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Consul and Google Kubernetes Engine

Consul Reviews

Alternatives to Deferendum
Consul: Deferendum offers more flexibility than Consul in terms of group decision-making, as it allows members to participate remotely and at their own pace. Consul is designed for use by government and public institutions, whereas Deferendum is a tool for any group looking to improve their decision-making processes.
Source: deferendum.com

Google Kubernetes Engine Reviews

Top 12 Kubernetes Alternatives to Choose From in 2023
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a prominent choice for a Kubernetes alternative. It is provided and managed by Google Cloud, which offers fully managed Kubernetes services.
Source: humalect.com
11 Best Rancher Alternatives Multi Cluster Orchestration Platform
Google Kubernetes Engine is a CaaS (container as a service) platform that lets you easily create, resize, manage, update, upgrade, and debug container clusters. Google Kubernetes Engine, aka GKE, was the first managed Kubernetes service, and therefore, it is highly regarded in the industry.
Top 10 Best Container Software in 2022
If you need a speedy creation of developer environments, working on micro services-based architecture and if you want to deploy production grade clusters then Docker and Google Kubernetes Engine would be the most suitable tools. They are very well suited for DevOps team.
7 Best Containerization Software Solutions of 2022
If you’re looking for a managed solution to help you deploy and scale containerized apps on your virtual machines quickly, Google Kubernetes Engine is a great choice.
Source: techgumb.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Google Kubernetes Engine should be more popular than Consul. It has been mentiond 49 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Consul mentions (6)

  • Tracetest in Action: Running Trace-Based Tests on the OpenTelemetry Demo App with Nomad
    Is the address at which the gRPC endpoint is served. In this case, we’re using Consul DNS to expose the service’s address. If we look at the Recommendation Service’s Nomad jobspec, you’ll see that the name of the gRPC service is recommendationservice. So when we query it in Consul, it should be accessible at this address recommendationservice.service.consul. We can test this by logging into the HashiQube image. Do... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • How to Convert Kubernetes Manifests into Nomad Jobspecs
    By default, the service is registered to Consul. Although we don’t explicitly say so, it’s the equivalent of adding a provider = "consul" attribute to the service stanza. You can register your services to either Nomad or Consul. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Running the OpenTelemetry Demo App on HashiCorp Nomad
    Before you start, just a friendly reminder that HashiQube by default runs Nomad, Vault, and Consul on Docker. In addition, we’ll be deploying 21 job specs to Nomad. This means that we’ll need a decent amount of CPU and RAM, so Please make sure that you have enough resources allocated in your Docker desktop. For reference, I’m running an M1 Macbook Pro with 8 cores and 32 GB RAM. My Docker Desktop Resource... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Order of Installation
    IP Addresses are hard to remember, so let's allow everything to interact based on hostname and domain name (I use PiHole and consul.io for this as it gives me ad blocking and service discovery). Source: about 3 years ago
  • An Introduction to Microservices pt. 3
    We'll begin by going the Consul.io website and downloading it. Consul will act as our Service Registry. Just for the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be running Consul in developer mode. After downloading Consul, you can add it to you system PATH, or run it from wherever directory you want it. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
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Google Kubernetes Engine mentions (49)

  • Google Cloud Unveils A4 VMs with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs for AI
    Integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which supports up to 65,000 nodes per cluster, facilitating robust AI infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Deploy Gemini-powered LangChain applications on GKE
    In my previous post, we explored how LangChain simplifies the development of AI-powered applications. We saw how its modularity, flexibility, and extensibility make it a powerful tool for working with large language models (LLMs) like Gemini. Now, let's take it a step further and see how we can deploy and scale our LangChain applications using the robust infrastructure of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and the... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Securing Applications Using Keycloak's Helm Chart
    Kubernetes cluster: You need a running Kubernetes cluster that supports persistent volumes. You can use a local cluster, like kind or Minikube, or a cloud-based solution, like GKE%20orEKS or EKS. The cluster should expose ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) for external access. Persistent storage should be configured to retain Keycloak data (e.g., user credentials, sessions) across restarts. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Simplify development of AI-powered applications with LangChain
    In a later post, I will take a look at how you can use LangChain to connect to a local Gemma instance, all running in a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • 26 Top Kubernetes Tools
    Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is another managed Kubernetes service that lets you spin up new cloud clusters on demand. It's specifically designed to help you run Kubernetes workloads without specialist Kubernetes expertise, and it includes a range of optional features that provide more automation for admin tasks. These include powerful capabilities around governance, compliance, security, and configuration... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Consul and Google Kubernetes Engine, you can also consider the following products

ServiceNow - ServiceNow automates and manages global enterprise service relationships. Create a single system of record for enterprise services, automate manual tasks, consolidate legacy ITIL systems.

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Freshservice - Freshservice: the one-stop cloud solution for all your IT management needs.

Amazon ECS - Amazon EC2 Container Service is a highly scalable, high-performance​ container management service that supports Docker containers.

Kaseya VSA - Kaseya VSA is a software used in remote monitoring, information technology management, cloud-based and network security resolution that gives functionalities and tools to IT enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSP) to enable systems to become…

Docker - Docker is an open platform that enables developers and system administrators to create distributed applications.