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amazon-s3consulhashicorp-vault

HashiCorp Consul vs AWS S3 as backend storage for HashiCorp Vault?


I'm doing review now and can't see any disadvantages of using S3 over the Consul for Vault backend storage, i think that even deploying Consul in multiple EC2 scenario would cost more. For example 10GB of EBS volume cost more than 10GB of S3. HA? By default S3 is already HA, so no difference there. S3 would also be more protected from accidental deletion.

Is there any perfomance penalty on mid or big scale environment that S3 would struggle?? What else could be the differentiation factor? Some feature that i have overlooked? Thanks in advance.


Solution

  • Here is the answer to this question>

    1. S3 offers "4 nines" of availability or 99,99% four nines or 99.99% availability allows 52 minutes, 36 seconds downtime per year.

    Consul can achieve greater HA.

    1. The Vault storage engine doesn't allow for Vault HA (native Vault HA, not keepalive) with S3. You can only run a single Vault server when using the S3 backend.

    2. If you want to upgrade to Vault Enterprise, HashiCorp is giving this only with Consul, so there is no option with S3.