[curun1r]

> Between Exhibitor and Curator, I honestly find Zookeeper so straightforward and easy to work with that I don't quite understand the popularity of etcd.

Tools like etcd and consul fit into the Unix philosophy of small, composable tools. Zookeeper is more a part of the Enterprise Java philosophy which many people have written off for various reasons, both rational and irrational.

Having run Zookeeper in the past and now having run Consul in production for the past ~6 months, I can't imagine ever running Zookeeper again, unless I'm using a tool that's built on top of it. Consul is just easier to use/maintain and we've yet to run into any problem with it. Zero problems in six months. In all the time I ran Zookeeper, I could never say that.

[eropple]

Wait a tick, how does consul fit into the "Unix philosophy" (which is asinine, bullshit, and wrongheaded, in whatever order you please, but set that aside) but Zookeeper doesn't? Your description of running Consul problem-free but being stricken with issues with Zookeeper is foreign to me, but okay, anecdotes, but this is bonkers, man. Consul being a DNS server and a K/V store and a health checker is so not-Unix-philosophy it should hurt you physically to say that.

I mean, Consul is fine for what it does. I've used both, whatever. But if you're going to have something that does a bunch of things, I'd much rather have the one that supports the primitives to do what somebody needs, rather than trying to do it all itself.

(Personally, after trying to work with Terraform, I don't much trust Hashicorp's attempts to write code I have to rely on to work correctly and never ever break. YMMV, of course.)

[curun1r]

> how does consul fit into the "Unix philosophy"

- Single binary executable

- Compatible with ps (Zookeeper has the traditional java problem of showing up as .../bin/java followed by 4 lines of classpath)

- Arguments to consul don't need to be prefaced with -D (another common java problem)

- Passing -h to consul actually helps you figure out how to run it.

Oh, and the download is 1/3 the size of Zookeeper, and the executable includes the Go runtime whereas Zookeeper's java runtime is separate.

Etcd is actually much closer to the Unix philosophy. Consul seems to go more in the direction of similar Go tools like Docker where it bundles related activities together into one executable. But, then again, parts of the Unix ecosystem do this to (openssl, for one).