You were looking at very, very old documentation which is why I wanted to drop it. Cassandra is on 2.0 and uses a practically identical consensus algorithm [Paxos] to Consul [Raft] except for the implementation details. I'm not sure how much practical advantage something like Consul has over a discovery layer built on Cassandra.
I didn't see a good way to sort this conversation out without a very, very long conversation in a thread dedicated to a release announcement.
Consul is a totally different thing to Cassandra. Consul could be built on top of Cassandra, but it would not provide any advantages. Why would you want to maintain a separate datastore?
Consul is a single static binary that uses around 11MB of RAM. Cassandra is a complex distributed datastore that requires the JVM and uses many gigabytes of RAM.
Well you definitely just cleared it up, thanks -- was completely wrong in my assumptions. Looks like armon from consul team has answered, that's probably a much better way to go.
Still -- I think that consul is a more generic tool than Cassandra. The cluster-management tools I see on their page seem to be java-focused, if not cassandra-focused (as in, outside of just managing the cassandra cluster, JConsole manages java apps, supposedly, not any kind of app that can make an HTTP request, which Consul seems to offer).
I didn't see a good way to sort this conversation out without a very, very long conversation in a thread dedicated to a release announcement.