Deploy Consul on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

In this guide you will deploy a Consul datacenter to Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE) on Google Cloud Platform(GCP) with HashiCorp’s official Helm chart. You do not need to update any values in the Helm chart for a basic installation. However, we will be creating a values file with parameters to allow access to the Consul UI.

»Prerequisites

»Installing gcloud, kubectl, and helm CLI tools

To follow this guide, you will need the Google Cloud SDK(gcloud), as well as kubectl and helm.

Reference the following instruction for setting up the Google Cloud SDK as well as general documentation:

• Google Cloud SDK
• Google Cloud Documentation

To initialize the Google command-line tool to use the Google Cloud SDK, you can use gcloud init.

$ gcloud init

Reference the following instructions to download kubectl and helm:

• kubectl
• helm

»Installing helm and kubectl with Homebrew on MacOS

Install kubectl on MacOS with Homebrew.

$ brew install kubernetes-cli

Install helm on MacOS with Homebrew.

$ brew install kubernetes-helm

»Service account authentication (optional)

You should create a GCP IAM service account and authenticate with it on the command line.

• To review the GCP IAM service account documentation, go here
• To interact with GCP IAM service accounts, go here

Once you have obtained your GCP IAM service account key-file, you can authenticate your local gcloud cli by running the following:

$ gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file="<path-to/my-consul-service-account.json>"

»Create a Kubernetes cluster

Review the GCP documentation for creating and administering a Kubernetes cluster within GCP. Note, for a quick start, you can also easily create a GKE cluster from the GCP console by clicking "Create Cluster", using the defaults, and clicking "Create."

»Configure kubectl to talk to your cluster

From the GCP console, where you previously created your cluster, click the "Connect" button. Copy the snippet provided and paste it into your terminal.

$ gcloud container clusters get-credentials my-consul-cluster --zone us-west1-b --project my-project

You can then run kubectl cluster-info to verify you are connected to your Kubernetes cluster:

$ kubectl cluster-info

Kubernetes master is running at https://<your GKE ip(s)>
GLBCDefaultBackend is running at https://<your GKE ip(s)>/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/default-http-backend:http/proxy
Heapster is running at https://<your GKE ip(s)>/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/heapster/proxy
KubeDNS is running at https://<your GKE ip(s)>/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
Metrics-server is running at https://<your GKE ip(s)>/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/https:metrics-server:/proxy

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use kubectl cluster-info dump.

»Deploy Consul

You can deploy a complete Consul datacenter using the official Helm chart. By default, the chart will install three Consul servers and one client per Kubernetes nodes in your GKE cluster. You can review the Helm chart values to learn more about the default settings.

»Add the HashiCorp Helm chart repository

First, you will need to add the HashiCorp Helm Chart repository:

$ helm repo add hashicorp https://helm.releases.hashicorp.com

"hashicorp" has been added to your repositories

For testing, it is not necessary to customize the default Helm chart config before deploying Consul because it comes with reasonable defaults. However, for this guide, you will update several values to customize the installation and enable access to the UI. Review the Helm chart documentation to learn more about the chart.

»Creating a values file

To customize your deployment, you can pass a yaml file to be used during the deployment, it will override the Helm chart's defaults. The following values changes your datacenter name, enables the Consul UI via a service, and enables the syncCatalog feature.

# helm-consul-values.yaml
global:
  datacenter: hashidc1

ui:
  service:
    type: 'LoadBalancer'

syncCatalog:
  enabled: true

»Install Consul with Helm

Once the configuration is complete you can use Helm to install the chart.

»Helm install

Now, you can deploy Consul using helm install. You will be passing in the values file we created above and the location of our helm chart. We recommend verifying your install/upgrade with --dry-run prior to your actual run.

$ helm install -f helm-consul-values.yaml hashicorp hashicorp/consul

The output of helm install will show you the details of your Consul deployment, but you can also use kubectl get pods to verify your cluster:

$ kubectl get pods

NAME                                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
hashicorp-consul-fmd8f                           0/1     Running   0          26s
hashicorp-consul-mvkh8                           0/1     Running   0          26s
hashicorp-consul-ngkss                           0/1     Running   0          26s
hashicorp-consul-server-0                        0/1     Running   0          26s
hashicorp-consul-server-1                        0/1     Running   0          26s
hashicorp-consul-server-2                        0/1     Running   0          26s
hashicorp-consul-sync-catalog-6bc5f86c85-fqjhs   0/1     Running   0          26s

»Accessing the Consul UI

Since you enabled the Consul UI in your values file, you can run kubectl get services to find the external IP of your UI service.

$ kubectl get services

NAME                       TYPE           CLUSTER-IP    EXTERNAL-IP             PORT(S)                                                                   AGE
consul                     ExternalName   <none>        consul.service.consul   <none>                                                                    4s
hashicorp-consul-dns       ClusterIP      10.12.8.3     <none>                  53/TCP,53/UDP                                                             63s
hashicorp-consul-server    ClusterIP      None          <none>                  8500/TCP,8301/TCP,8301/UDP,8302/TCP,8302/UDP,8300/TCP,8600/TCP,8600/UDP   63s
hashicorp-consul-ui        LoadBalancer   10.12.6.197   104.198.132.100         80:30037/TCP                                                              63s
kubernetes                 ClusterIP      10.12.0.1     <none>                  443/TCP                                                                   77m

You can see above that, in this case, the UI is exposed at 104.198.132.100 over port 80. Navigate to the external IP in your browser to interact with the Consul UI:

»Accessing Consul with the CLI and API

In addition to accessing Consul with the UI, you can manage Consul with the HTTP API or by directly connecting to the pod with kubectl.

You can use the Consul HTTP API by communicating to the local agent running on the Kubernetes node. You can read the documentation if you are interested in learning more about using the Consul HTTP API with Kubernetes.

»Kubectl

To access the pod and data directory you can exec into the pod with kubectl to start a shell session.

$ kubectl exec -it hashicorp-consul-server-0 /bin/sh

This will allow you to navigate the file system and run Consul CLI commands on the pod. For example you can view the Consul members.

$ consul members

Node                                               Address        Status  Type    Build  Protocol  DC        Segment
hashicorp-consul-server-0                          10.8.1.9:8301  alive   server  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <all>
hashicorp-consul-server-1                          10.8.2.4:8301  alive   server  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <all>
hashicorp-consul-server-2                          10.8.0.8:8301  alive   server  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <all>
gke-standard-cluster-1-default-pool-60f986c7-19nq  10.8.0.7:8301  alive   client  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <default>
gke-standard-cluster-1-default-pool-60f986c7-q7mn  10.8.1.8:8301  alive   client  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <default>
gke-standard-cluster-1-default-pool-60f986c7-xwz6  10.8.2.3:8301  alive   client  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <default>

»Using Consul environment variables

You can also access the Consul datacenter with your local Consul binary by setting the environment variables documented here.

In this case, since you are exposing HTTP via the load balancer/UI service, you can export our CONSUL_HTTP_ADDR to the same external IP we used to access the UI above:

$ export CONSUL_HTTP_ADDR=http://104.198.132.100:80

You can now use your local installation of the Consul binary to run Consul commands:

$ consul members

Node                                               Address        Status  Type    Build  Protocol  DC        Segment
hashicorp-consul-server-0                          10.8.1.9:8301  alive   server  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <all>
hashicorp-consul-server-1                          10.8.2.4:8301  alive   server  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <all>
hashicorp-consul-server-2                          10.8.0.8:8301  alive   server  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <all>
gke-standard-cluster-1-default-pool-60f986c7-19nq  10.8.0.7:8301  alive   client  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <default>
gke-standard-cluster-1-default-pool-60f986c7-q7mn  10.8.1.8:8301  alive   client  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <default>
gke-standard-cluster-1-default-pool-60f986c7-xwz6  10.8.2.3:8301  alive   client  1.6.1  2         hashidc1  <default>

»Next steps

In this guide, you deployed a Consul datacenter to Google Kubernetes Engine using the official Helm chart. You also configured access to the Consul UI. To learn more about deployment best practices, review the Kubernetes Reference Architecture guide.