diff --git a/website/source/intro/index.html.md b/website/source/intro/index.html.md index ff914838b..27ec9b047 100644 --- a/website/source/intro/index.html.md +++ b/website/source/intro/index.html.md @@ -16,9 +16,15 @@ detailed reference of available features. ## What is Consul? -Consul is a service mesh solution that has multiple components for -discovering, connecting, configuring, and securing services in your -infrastructure. It provides several key features: +Consul is a service mesh solution providing a full featured control plane +with service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionality. Each +of these features can be used individually as needed, or they can be used +together to build a full service mesh. Consul requires a data plane and +supports both a proxy and native integration model. Consul ships with a +simple built-in proxy so that everything works out of the box, but also +supports 3rd party proxy integrations such as Envoy. + +The key features of Consul are: * **Service Discovery**: Clients of Consul can register a service, such as `api` or `mysql`, and other clients can use Consul to discover providers diff --git a/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md b/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md index 49437e9de..4710db7da 100644 --- a/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md +++ b/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md @@ -14,14 +14,10 @@ To enable the full functionality of Istio, multiple services must be deployed. For the control plane: Pilot, Mixer, and Citadel must be deployed and for the data plane an Envoy sidecar is deployed. Additionally, Istio requires a 3rd party service catalog from Kubernetes, Consul, Eureka, -or others. At a minimum, three Istio-dedicated services along with at +or others. Finally, Istio requires an external system for storing state, +typically etcd. At a minimum, three Istio-dedicated services along with at least one separate distributed system (in addition to Istio) must be -configured for the full functionality of Istio. - -Istio plans to work on any platform, but currently has a hard dependency -on the Kubernetes API. While the documentation covers connecting non-Kubernetes -services, it assumes that a Kubernetes deployment exists for the control -plane. +configured to use the full functionality of Istio. Istio provides layer 7 features for path-based routing, traffic shaping, load balancing, and telemetry. Access control policies can be configured @@ -75,3 +71,9 @@ Because Consul's service connection feature "Connect" is built-in, it inherits the operational stability of Consul. Consul has been in production for large companies since 2014 and is known to be deployed on as many as 50,000 nodes in a single cluster. + +This comparison is based on our own limited usage of Istio as well as +talking to Istio users. If you feel there are inaccurate statements in this +comparison, please click "Edit This Page" in the footer of this page and +propose edits. We strive for technical accuracy and will review and update +this post for inaccuracies as quickly as possible.