In this tutorial you will deploy a Consul datacenter to the Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) 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
»Installing aws-cli, kubectl, and helm CLI tools
To follow this tutorial, you will need the aws-cli binary installed, as well as kubectl and helm.
Reference the following instruction for setting up aws-cli as well as general documentation:
Reference the following instructions to download kubectl and helm:
»Installing helm and kubectl with Homebrew
Homebrew allows you to quickly install both Helm and kubectl on MacOS & Linux.
Install kubectl with Homebrew.
Install helm with Homebrew.
»VPC and security group creation
The AWS documentation for creating an EKS cluster assumes that you have a VPC and a dedicated security group created. The instructions on how to create these are here:
You will need the SecurityGroups, VpcId, and SubnetId values for the EKS cluster creation step.
»Create an EKS cluster
At least a three node EKS cluster is required to deploy Consul using the official Consul Helm chart. Create a three node cluster on EKS by following the the EKS AWS documentation.
Note: If using eksctl, you can use this command to create a three-node cluster: eksctl create cluster --name=<YOUR CLUSTER NAME> --region=<YOUR REGION> --nodes=3
»Configure kubectl to talk to your cluster
Setting up kubectl to talk to your EKS cluster should be as simple as running the following:
You can then run the command kubectl cluster-info to verify you are connected to your Kubernetes cluster:
You can also review the documentation for configuring kubectl and EKS here:
»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 EKS 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 default values. 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 three servers and three clients 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://aabd04e592a324a369daf25df429accd-601998447.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com over port 80. Navigate to the load balancer DNS name or external IP 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 the command 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.
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 AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service 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.
