consul/website/source/intro/vs/skydns.html.markdown

---
layout: "intro"
page_title: "Consul vs. SkyDNS"
sidebar_current: "vs-other-skydns"
description: |-
  SkyDNS is a relatively new tool designed to solve service discovery. It uses multiple central servers that are strongly consistent and fault tolerant. Nodes register services using an HTTP API, and queries can be made over HTTP or DNS to perform discovery.
---

# Consul vs. SkyDNS

SkyDNS is a relatively new tool designed to solve service discovery.
It uses multiple central servers that are strongly consistent and
fault tolerant. Nodes register services using an HTTP API, and
queries can be made over HTTP or DNS to perform discovery.

Consul is very similar, but provides a superset of features. Consul
also relies on multiple central servers to provide strong consistency
and fault tolerance. Nodes can use an HTTP API or use an agent to
register services, and queries are made over HTTP or DNS.

However, the systems differ in many ways. Consul provides a much richer
health checking framework, with support for arbitrary checks and
a highly scalable failure detection scheme. SkyDNS relies on naive
heartbeating and TTLs, which have known scalability issues. Additionally,
the heartbeat only provides a limited liveness check, versus the rich
health checks that Consul is capable of.

Multiple datacenters can be supported by using "regions" in SkyDNS,
however the data is managed and queried from a single cluster. If servers
are split between datacenters the replication protocol will suffer from
very long commit times. If all the SkyDNS servers are in a central datacenter, then
connectivity issues can cause entire datacenters to lose availability.
Additionally, even without a connectivity issue, query performance will
suffer as requests must always be performed in a remote datacenter.

Consul supports multiple datacenters out of the box, and it purposely
scopes the managed data to be per-datacenter. This means each datacenter
runs an independent cluster of servers. Requests are forwarded to remote
datacenters if necessary. This means requests for services within a datacenter
never go over the WAN, and connectivity issues between datacenters do not
affect availability within a datacenter. Additionally, the unavailability
of one datacenter does not affect the service discovery of services
in any other datacenter.