Consul Integration

Consul is a widely used service mesh. You can use Consul with Ambassador Edge Stack, as it natively supports Consul for service discovery and end-to-end TLS (including mTLS between services). This capability is particularly useful when deploying Ambassador Edge Stack in so-called hybrid clouds, where applications are deployed on VMs and Kubernetes. In this environment, Ambassador Edge Stack can securely route over TLS to any application regardless of where it is deployed.

Architecture Overview

In this architecture, Consul serves as the source of truth for your entire data center, tracking available endpoints, service configuration, and secrets for TLS encryption. New applications and services automatically register themselves with Consul using the Consul agent or API. When a request is sent through Ambassador Edge Stack, Ambassador Edge Stack sends the request to an endpoint based on the data in Consul.

Getting Started

In this guide, you will register a service with Consul and use Ambassador Edge Stack to dynamically route requests to that service based on Consul's service discovery data. If you already have Ambassador Edge Stack installed, you will just need to configure the ConsulResolver in step 3.

1. Install and configure Consul (instructions). Consul can be deployed anywhere in your data center.

2. Deploy Ambassador Edge Stack. Note: If this is your first time deploying Ambassador Edge Stack, reviewing the quick start guide is strongly recommended.

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   kubectl apply -f https://www.getambassador.io/yaml/ambassador/ambassador-rbac.yaml

   If you're on GKE, or haven't previously created the Ambassador Edge Stack service, please see the quick start guide.

3. Configure Ambassador Edge Stack to look for services registered to Consul by creating the ConsulResolver:

   yaml

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   ---
   apiVersion: getambassador.io/v2
   kind: ConsulResolver
   metadata:
     name: consul-dc1
   spec:
     address: consul-server.default.svc.cluster.local:8500
     datacenter: dc1

   This will tell Ambassador Edge Stack that Consul is a service discovery endpoint. Save the configuration to a file (e.g., ambassador-service.yaml, and apply this configuration with kubectl apply -f ambassador-service.yaml. For more information about resolver configuration, see the resolver reference documentation. (If you're using Consul deployed elsewhere in your data center, make sure the address points to your Consul FQDN or IP address).

Routing to Consul Services

You'll now register a demo application with Consul, and show how Ambassador Edge Stack can route to this application using endpoint data from Consul. To simplify this tutorial, you'll deploy the application in Kubernetes, although in practice this application can be deployed anywhere in your data center (e.g., on VMs).

1. Deploy the QOTM demo application. The QOTM application contains code to automatically register itself with Consul, using the CONSUL_IP and POD_IP environment variables specified within the QOTM container spec.

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   ---
   apiVersion: apps/v1
   kind: Deployment
   metadata:
     name: qotm
   spec:
     replicas: 1
     strategy:
       type: RollingUpdate
     selector:
       matchLabels:
         app: qotm
     template:
       metadata:
         labels:
           app: qotm
         annotations:
           "consul.hashicorp.com/connect-inject": "false"
       spec:
         containers:
         - name: qotm
           image: datawire/qotm:1.7
           ports:
           - name: http-api
             containerPort: 5000
           env:
           - name: CONSUL_IP
             valueFrom:
               fieldRef:
                 fieldPath: status.hostIP
           - name: POD_IP
             valueFrom:
               fieldRef:
                 fieldPath: status.podIP
           readinessProbe:
             httpGet:
               path: /health
               port: 5000
             initialDelaySeconds: 30
             periodSeconds: 3
           resources:
             limits:
               cpu: "0.1"
               memory: 100Mi

   Save the above to a file called qotm.yaml and run kubectl apply -f qotm.yaml. This will register the QOTM pod as a Consul service with the name qotm-consul and the IP address of the QOTM pod.

2. Verify the QOTM pod has been registered with Consul. You can verify the QOTM pod is registered correctly by accessing the Consul UI.

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   kubectl port-forward service/consul-ui 8500:80

   Go to http://localhost:8500/ from a web browser and you should see a service named qotm-consul.

3. Create a Mapping for the qotm-consul service.

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   ---
   apiVersion: getambassador.io/v2
   kind: Mapping
   metadata:
     name: consul-qotm-mapping
   spec:
     prefix: /qotm-consul/
     service: qotm-consul
     resolver: consul-dc1
     load_balancer:
       policy: round_robin

Save the above YAML to a file named qotm-mapping.yaml, and use kubectl apply -f qotm-mapping.yaml to apply this configuration to your Kubernetes cluster. Note that in the above config:

• resolver must be set to the ConsulResolver that you created in the previous step
• load_balancer must be set to configure Ambassador Edge Stack to route directly to the QOTM application endpoint(s) that are retrieved from Consul.

4. Send a request to the qotm-consul API.

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   curl -L http://$AMBASSADOR_IP/qotm-consul/
   {"hostname":"qotm-749c675c6c-hq58f","ok":true,"quote":"The last sentence you read is often sensible nonsense.","time":"2019-03-29T22:21:42.197663","version":"1.7"}

Congratulations! You're successfully routing traffic to the QOTM application, the location of which is registered in Consul.

Encrypted TLS

Ambassador Edge Stack can also use certificates stored in Consul to originate encrypted TLS connections from Ambassador Edge Stack to the Consul service mesh. This requires the use of the Ambassador Edge Stack Consul connector. The following steps assume you've already set up Consul for service discovery, as detailed above.

1. The Ambassador Consul connector retrieves the TLS certificate issued by the Consul CA and stores it in a Kubernetes secret for Ambassador Edge Stack to use. Deploy the Ambassador Edge Stack Consul Connector with kubectl:

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   kubectl apply -f https://www.getambassador.io/yaml/consul/ambassador-consul-connector.yaml

This will install into your cluster:

• RBAC resources.
• The Consul connector service.
• A TLSContext named ambassador-consul to load the ambassador-consul-connect secret into Ambassador Edge Stack.

2. Deploy a new version of the demo application, and configure it to inject the Consul sidecar proxy by setting "consul.hashicorp.com/connect-inject" to true. Note that in this version of the configuration, you do not have to configure environment variables for the location of the Consul server:

   yaml

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   ---
   apiVersion: apps/v1
   kind: Deployment
   metadata:
     name: qotm-mtls
   spec:
     replicas: 1
     strategy:
       type: RollingUpdate
     selector:
       matchLabels:
         app: qotm
     template:
       metadata:
         labels:
           app: qotm
         annotations:
           "consul.hashicorp.com/connect-inject": "true"
       spec:
         containers:
         - name: qotm
           image: datawire/qotm:1.7
           ports:
           - name: http-api
             containerPort: 5000
           readinessProbe:
             httpGet:
               path: /health
               port: 5000
             initialDelaySeconds: 30
             periodSeconds: 3
           resources:
             limits:
               cpu: "0.1"
               memory: 100Mi

   Copy this YAML in a file called qotm-consul-mtls.yaml and apply it to your cluster with kubectl apply -f qotm-consul-mtls.yaml.

   This will deploy a demo application called qotm-mtls with the Connect sidecar proxy. The Connect proxy will register the application with Consul, require TLS to access the application, and expose other Consul Service Segmentation features.

3. Verify the qotm-mtls application is registered in Consul by accessing the Consul UI on http://localhost:8500/ after running:

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   kubectl port-forward service/consul-ui 8500:80

   You should see a service registered as qotm-proxy.

4. Create a Mapping to route to the qotm-mtls-proxy service in Consul

   yaml

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   ---
   apiVersion: getambassador.io/v2
   kind: Mapping
   metadata:
     name: consul-qotm-mapping-tls
   spec:
     prefix: /qotm-consul-tls/
     service: qotm-sidecar-proxy
     resolver: consul-dc1
     tls: ambassador-consul
     load_balancer:
       policy: round_robin

   • resolver must be set to the ConsulResolver created when configuring Ambassador Edge Stack
   • tls must be set to the TLSContext storing the Consul mTLS certificates (e.g. ambassador-consul)
   • load_balancer must be set to configure Ambassador Edge Stack to route directly to the application endpoint(s) that are retrieved from Consul

   Copy this YAML to a file named qotm-consul-mtls-mapping.yaml and apply it to your cluster with kubectl apply -f qotm-consul-mtls-mapping.yaml.

5. Send a request to the /qotm-consul-tls/ API.

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   curl -L $AMBASSADOR_IP/qotm-consul-tls/
   {"hostname":"qotm-6c6dc4f67d-hbznl","ok":true,"quote":"A principal idea is omnipresent, much like candy.","time":"2019-04-17T19:27:54.758361","version":"1.7"}

Environment Variables

The Consul Connector can be configured with the following environment variables. The defaults will be best for most use-cases.

More Information

For more about Ambassador Edge Stack's integration with Consul, read the service discovery configuration documentation.