Introduction

Modern applications often rely on containerization and microservices to achieve scalability and flexibility. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) simplifies the deployment and management of these containerized applications using the power of Kubernetes. To further enhance your EKS deployments with features like service discovery, secure communication, and traffic management, HashiCorp Consul provides a robust service mesh solution.

This guide demonstrates how to leverage infrastructure-as-code with Terraform to:

• Provision an EKS cluster on AWS.
• Seamlessly install and configure Consul within your EKS environment.

By following these steps, you'll gain a foundational understanding of deploying and integrating Consul with EKS, enabling a more robust and manageable microservices architecture.

Expected Outcome

After completing this guide, you will have:

• A fully functional EKS cluster running on AWS.
• Consul successfully installed and configured within your EKS cluster.
• A basic understanding of how to use Terraform to manage EKS and Consul deployments.
• A foundation for building and deploying secure and scalable microservices applications with EKS and Consul.

This setup will provide you with the tools to leverage Consul's service mesh capabilities, including service discovery, health checks, traffic management, and secure communication within your EKS environment.

Prerequisites

Before we dive into the implementation, ensure you have the following prerequisites in place:

1. AWS Account: You should have an AWS account with the necessary permissions to create resources like EKS clusters, IAM roles, and VPC components.

2. Terraform: Install Terraform on your local machine. You can download it from the official Terraform website and follow their installation instructions.

3. GitHub Repository: Clone or have access to the GitHub repository containing the Terraform code and necessary configurations. For reference, you can use a repository like consul-aws-eks-terraform, which provides pre-built Terraform modules for creating an EKS cluster.

Procedure

Deploying Consul on EKS with Terraform

1. Clone the repository:

   • Clone the GitHub repository containing the Terraform code for EKS cluster creation:

   git clone https://github.com/SuyashHashiCorp/consul-aws-eks-terraform.git
   cd consul-aws-eks-terraform
   

2. Configure AWS credentials:

   • Set up AWS credentials locally using the AWS CLI or update the "~/.aws/credentials" file with your AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY.

3. Customize variables:

   • Open variables.tf and adjust values like cluster name, region, instance types, and Consul configuration as needed.

4. Initialize and deploy:

   • Run the following commands to initialize Terraform and create the EKS cluster with Consul:

   terraform init
   terraform plan
   terraform apply
   

5. Monitor progress:

   • Observe the output of the terraform apply command for updates on the cluster creation and Consul deployment.

6. Validate EKS cluster:

   • Once deployment is complete, use the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI to verify the cluster's status.

7. Configure kubectl:

   • Connect to your EKS cluster using the kubectl tool:

   aws eks update-kubeconfig --region <your region> --name <your cluster name>
   

8. Verify Kubernetes connection:

   • Run kubectl cluster-info to confirm that you're connected to your EKS cluster.

Conclusion

By combining EKS with Consul, you gain a powerful platform for running and managing microservices. Terraform's infrastructure-as-code approach simplifies the deployment and configuration process, while Consul enhances service discovery, security, and traffic management within your Kubernetes environment. As you delve deeper into the Kubernetes ecosystem, consider exploring advanced Consul features to further optimize your microservices architecture.

Important: The provided Terraform configurations are a starting point. Ensure you adjust settings such as instance types, regions, and security policies to meet your specific requirements before deploying the EKS cluster and Consul.

Reference

1. Consul Helm Chart Reference
2. Consul on Kubernetes Version Compatibility
3. Consul on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)