In this tutorial you will deploy a Consul datacenter to the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with HashiCorp's official Helm chart or the Consul K8S CLI. You do not need to override any values in the Helm chart for a basic installation, however, in this guide you will be creating a config file with custom values to allow access to the Consul UI.
Security Warning This tutorial is not for production use. By default, the chart will install an insecure configuration of Consul. Please refer to the Kubernetes deployment guide to determine how you can secure Consul on Kubernetes in production. Additionally, it is highly recommended to use a properly secured Kubernetes cluster or make sure that you understand and enable the recommended security features.
»Prerequisites
To complete this tutorial successfully, you should have an Azure account with the ability to create a Kubernetes cluster.
All the tools you need are installed in the Azure Cloud Shell. Visit the Cloud Shell to run this example.
NOTE: This example uses the latest version of Helm and kubectl, which are installed with the Azure Cloud Shell.
»Create an AKS cluster
At least a three node AKS cluster is required to deploy Consul using the official Consul Helm chart or the Consul K8S CLI. Create a three node cluster on AKS by following the the AKS documentation.
»Configure kubectl to talk to your cluster
Login to the Azure Shell on your console.
Verify you are connected to your Kubernetes cluster.
»Deploy Consul
You can deploy a complete Consul datacenter using the official Consul Helm chart or the Consul K8S CLI. By default, these methods will install a total of three Consul servers as well as one client per Kubernetes node into your AKS cluster. You can review the Consul Kubernetes installation documentation to learn more about these installation options.
»Create 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 change your datacenter name and enable the Consul UI via a service.
»Install Consul in your cluster
You can now deploy a complete Consul datacenter in your Kubernetes cluster using the official Consul Helm chart or the Consul K8S CLI.
Run the command kubectl get pods to verify the Consul resources were successfully created.
»Accessing the Consul UI
Since you enabled the Consul UI in your values file, you can run the command kubectl get services to find the load balancer DNS name or external IP of your UI service.
You can verify that, in this case, the UI is exposed at http://20.72.249.50 over port 80. Navigate to the external IP or load balancer DNS name in your browser to interact with the Consul UI.
Click the Nodes tab and you can observe several Consul servers and agents running.
»Accessing Consul with the CLI and API
In addition to accessing Consul with the UI, you can manage Consul by directly connecting to the pod with kubectl.
You can also use the Consul HTTP API by communicating to the local agent running on the Kubernetes node. Feel free to explore the Consul API 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 remote execute into the pod with kubectl to start a shell session.
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 with the consul members command.
When you have finished interacting with the pod, exit the shell.
»Using Consul environment variables
You can also access the Consul datacenter with your local Consul binary by enabling environment variables. You can read more about Consul environment variables documented here.
In this case, since you are exposing HTTP via the load balancer/UI service, you can export the CONSUL_HTTP_ADDR variable to point to the load balancer DNS name (or external IP) of your Consul UI service:
You can now use your local installation of the Consul binary to run Consul commands:
»Next steps
In this tutorial, you deployed a Consul datacenter to the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using the official Helm chart or Consul K8S CLI. You also configured access to the Consul UI. To learn more about deployment best practices, review the Kubernetes Reference Architecture tutorial.
