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Consul BOSH Release

This is a modern BOSH Release for Consul, which is the fastest way to get up and running with a cluster of Hashicorp Consul when you're using BOSH.

You are provided here with all the necessary binaries, configuration templates, and startup scripts for converging Consul clusters (i.e. installing and updating over time) on Ubuntu Bionic nodes. Plus, we also provide here a standard deployment manifest to help you deploy your first Consul cluster easily.

Usage

This repository includes base manifests and operator files. They can be used for initial deployments and subsequently used for updating your deployments.

git clone https://github.com/gstackio/gk-consul-boshrelease.git
cd gk-consul-boshrelease/deploy

export BOSH_ENVIRONMENT=<bosh-alias>
export BOSH_DEPLOYMENT=consul
bosh deploy gk-consul.yml --vars-file=default-vars.yml

If your BOSH does not have Credhub/Config Server (but it should), then remember to use --vars-store to allow generation of passwords and certificates into a local YAML file.

Update

When new versions of gk-consul-boshrelease are released, the deploy/gk-consul.yml file is updated. This means you can easily git pull and bosh deploy to upgrade.

export BOSH_ENVIRONMENT=<bosh-alias>
export BOSH_DEPLOYMENT=consul
cd gk-consul-boshrelease/deploy
git pull
bosh deploy gk-consul.yml --vars-file=default-vars.yml

Clustering

Horizontal scaling works out of the box, with a mere updating of the instances: property in the deployment manifest. Scaling out to 5 nodes and then scaling in to 3 nodes again is a sandard test in the CI pipeline.

Design notes

This is a modern BOSH Release for Consul. This implies several design choices.

  • Use of BPM is mandatory.

  • Recent Consul version: 1.6.1, where other BOSH Release stick to version 0.7.x

  • About the start/drain/stop workflow:

    • Contrarily to Consul Release which implements a complex and non-documented Confab Golang binary to manage the Consul agent state, we don't run into such hard-to-maintain design.

    • Just like the Consul BOSH Release, we chose to run consul leave (ourselves, with leave_on_terminate: false to disallow Consul to do it “auto-magically”), and adopt rejoin_after_leave: true.

    • Contrarily to the Consul BOSH Release, we chose to run consul leave at drain time, instead of doing it at monit stop time. We do this in order not to introduce unnecessary delays at monit stop time (which is discouraged), but at drain time (which is recommended).

    • Unfortunately, Consul has no “consul drain” command in order for the node to drain any client connections and possibly step down from any cluster leader role. Instead, we use consul leave which is the only available command that is close enough from what we need when draining a node. For connections to have the necessary time to be drained, we adopt a 10 seconds delay in the drain script (with leave_drain_time: "10s").

  • About DNS-based service discovery

    • We don't allow other co-located jobs to expose /var/vcap/jobs/*/consul directories for pushing their own config about locally-checked service. On the contrary, the Consul BOSH Release adds such directories as -config-dir arguments to the Consul agent. See also the (now deprecated) Redis-Consul BOSH Release.

    • We don't implement serice definition similar to consul.services, allowing to specify locally-checked services. They are written to the ephemeral disk storage in /var/vcap/data/consul/services and this directory is added as -config-dir to the Consul agent invocation.

    • We natively interface Consul with BOSH DNS. We do this because BOSH DNS features have now been widely adopted in the BOSH community, and are the recommended way to do robust and resilient service discovery. Thus, this BOSH Release always registers Consul as a BOSH DNS handler. In this design, BOSH DNS delegates DNS requests to Consul whenever the Consul-reserved DNS domain (.consul by default) is queried.

      • This is the opposite of Consul BOSH Release design where Consul is the primary DNS server (as overridden in /etc/resolv.conf) and then recurse to external DNS servers for queries unrelated to the Consul-reserved DNS domain.

      • We don't run the Consul DNS service on port 53. We always keep it on the default 8600 port instead.

      • We don't provide the consul.resolvconf_override feature to force the local Consul agent as the primary DNS name server to use, in /etc/resolv.conf.

  • We higly support and enforce TLS encryption, with tls.enable defaulting to true, and mutual-TLS authentication with tls.enforce_mutual_tls also defaulting to true. Plus, we actively support TLS CA certificate rotation through the tls.ca_bundle property.

  • We also support enabling/disabling encryption with encrypt_verify_incoming and encrypt_verify_outgoing through the 3-steps process described in Consul documentation. Note: we haven't confirmed this yet, but disabling encryption temporarily might be the only way to rotate the encryption key, as Consul doesn't support two keys at the same time.

  • We use the recommended 8501 port for HTTPS API on Consul servers. The older Consul BOSH Release is re-using the HTTP port 8500 for this, which might create incompatibilities with toolings.

  • We help the BOSH operator to set the encrypt key more easily. Instead of requiring her/him to compute a Base-64 encoded 32-bytes encryption key with consul keygen manually, we allow the BOSH operator to use a 50+ charaters-long Credhub-generated (or BOSH CLI-generated) password, and we infer a 32-bytes binary key (taking care of not loosing entropy in the process) that we automatocally encode as Base-64 in Consul config.

Authors and License

Copyright © 2019-present, Benjamin Gandon, Gstack

Like the rest of BOSH, this Gstack Consul BOSH Release is released under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.