Preface

Have you ever spent hours troubleshooting a network, only to realize the network addresses for your applications changed? Or perhaps you've had to deflect flying coffee mugs from irate project managers because it is taking weeks to update a firewall or load balancer. Maybe your engineering teams are struggling with end-to-end encryption between their services, reinventing the wheel with every project, or leaving security up to the fictitious perimeter surrounding the network. If these situations sound familiar, HashiCorp Consul just might be the answer for your woes!

Consul provides a platform-independent solution for service discovery, network automation, and secure service communications. This book walks through the foundation of the Consul architecture, explaining how the servers and clients operate. We'll build our own Consul system in Amazon Web Services, and secure the system against cowans and eavesdroppers. With an established cluster, we'll start deploying services into the system, and show how Consul discovers and monitors these services. Multiple methods of sharing service information will be discussed. However, the continuing focus is on how Consul utilizes this information to dynamically adjust network infrastructure and facilitate secure connections among the registered services. Finally, we'll do a quick walk-through of HCP Consul, a Software as a Service solution offered on HashiCorp Cloud Platform.

Who this book is for

Any solution architects or DevOps engineers interested in the challenges and solutions of network management in a dynamic hybrid-cloud environment. A background in basic networking is helpful as we discuss device communication and connectivity, as well as the layers of the network stack. Knowledge of Terraform will be beneficial, as we'll be using Terraform to create and work with our system, but it is not required.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Consul Overview – Operation and Use Cases, starts the book with a short overview of Consul and a high-level understanding of the three primary Consul use cases.

Chapter 2, Architecture – How Does It Work?, shows us how the servers and agents operate and communicate, now that we have a basic understanding of "why" Consul.

Chapter 3, Keep It Safe, Stupid, and Secure Your Cluster!, looks at securing the entire system, now that we understand how Consul operates. We'll learn how to apply Zero Trust to all of our applications.

Chapter 4, Data Center (Not Trade) Federation, looks at how Consul facilitates the extension of the cluster across multiple environments for world domination, now that, within the global and everchanging world, our applications must extend beyond the geographical borders of data centers.

Chapter 5, Little Bo Peep Lost Her Service, looks at how Consul not only discovers services – the foundation of Consul's operation being service discovery, but within those services, it also monitors and shares service status information.

Chapter 6, Connect Four or More, looks at, with knowledge of our services and their location(s), using Consul to identify and secure the communication among our services.

Chapter 7, Animate Me, covers how to simplify our networking infrastructure management with Consul's service information, with an entire world outside of Consul that can make use of its dynamic service discovery.

Chapter 8, Where Do We Go Now?, provides some pathways to continue your Consul education and operation. We introduce the HashiCorp certification program for Consul Associate Certification for further knowledge. Additionally, we'll show you how to sign up for HashiCorp's hosted Consul solution enabling the adoption of Consul without the overhead of managing the cluster itself.

To get the most out of this book

Throughout this book, we'll be using Terraform to build and manage our Consul system, and although knowledge of Terraform would be beneficial, it isn't required. We'll walk through the Terraform code and what it performs in order to create and manage the Consul system. Much of our operations within the book utilize the bash command line. Familiarity with common bash operations and the use of emacs or vi for editing text documents will be useful.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781800202627_ColorImages.pdf.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Simplifying-Service-Management-with-Consul.

In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Within the Terraform output, you'll see a value for CONSUL_HTTP_ADDR."

A block of code is set as follows:

Apply complete! Resources: 23 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
Outputs:
CONSUL_HTTP_ADDR = "http://18.218.165.4:8500"
Consul_Server_IPs = [
  "3.139.233.155",
  "18.218.165.4",
  "18.219.179.22",
]

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AKIA26CFBA32D6JFVJJB
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=NYaSFhAzZqOq4bqSGJda/Y22Guc…

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "On the left side of the page, you should see a Users section where you can utilize an existing user or add a new one."

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

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