In this tutorial 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.
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 documentation 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 gcloud, kubectl, and helm CLI tools
To follow this tutorial, 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:
To initialize the Google command-line tool to use the Google Cloud SDK, you can use gcloud init.
Reference the following instructions to download kubectl and helm:
»Installing helm and kubectl with Homebrew on MacOS
Install kubectl on MacOS with Homebrew.
Install helm on MacOS with Homebrew.
»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:
»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.
You can then run kubectl cluster-info to verify you are connected to your Kubernetes cluster:
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:
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 tutorial, 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 and enables the Consul UI via a service.
»Install Consul with Helm
Once the configuration is complete you can use Helm to install the chart.
Using Helm 3.x there is nothing extra to configure and you can install the chart directly.
»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.
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:
»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.
You can verify from the output 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.
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.
»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 you used to access the UI above:
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 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 tutorial.
