What is the difference between Envoy Proxy and Consul?

Question

I am having tough time understanding the distinction between Envoy and Consul. What are the use cases for each one and what are the advantages ? They both seem to be providing service mesh, observability and load balancing.

Oma

Answer 1

Consul is a service mesh control plane which uses Envoy as its data plane proxy.

Data plane vs. control plane summary

• Service mesh data plane: Touches every packet/request in the system. Responsible for service discovery, health checking, routing, load balancing, authentication/authorization, and observability.
• Service mesh control plane: Provides policy and configuration for all of the running data planes in the mesh. Does not touch any packets/requests in the system. The control plane turns all of the data planes into a distributed system.

The above quote is from a blog post by the creator of Envoy, Matt Klein, entitled Service mesh data plane vs. control plane. I recommend reading the post in its entirety to better understand the role of a control plane & data plane within a service mesh.

I also recommend watching this video, Introduction to HashiCorp Consul Connect, for specifics of how Consul service mesh works.

Kondon