HCP Consul Updates: New Terraform Module for EKS and EC2, and an ECS Learn Guide

HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Consul is a managed service mesh and service discovery service. One of the goals of HCP is to provide an easier on-boarding experience for users exploring their service mesh and service discovery use cases.

To help reach that goal, we are pleased to share the availability of a new Terraform module for Amazon EKS and Amazon EC2, and a new HashiCorp Learn guide for deploying HCP Consul on Amazon ECS. Terraform modules, preconfigured blocks of code that perform a specific task during a Terraform apply, provide the perfect way to automate both HCP and the workload deployments in your Amazon Web Services virtual private cloud (VPC). Joining the existing set of HCP Terraform modules, this new module simplifies the HCP Consul onboarding experience by combining AWS and HCP Terraform resources into a single module abstraction.

The new module encompasses a series of client installations and a demo app that enable users to quickly evaluate Consul's capabilities. Starting from scratch, users can now easily deploy a full-fledged environment with a demo application and connect it to HCP.

One quick note, in order to run either of these demos, you will need to create a service principal. If you are unfamiliar with how to do so, please see the video below.

»Amazon EKS and Amazon EC2 Quickstart Demo

Modern greenfield applications are often developed using cloud-native microservices architectures, and organizations are looking for guidance on how to get started using these architectures. One common deployment runtime for these microservices architectures is Kubernetes, and in AWS, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is the most common choice. While users already have the option to deploy Consul clients using Consul’s Helm chart in EKS, the new quickstart demo leverages Terraform to deploy Consul clients and a dashboard/counting demo application.

However, service meshes aren’t only beneficial for Kubernetes environments. Many enterprises also have brownfield applications deployed on virtual machines. Enterprises typically require connectivity between services in VMs and Kubernetes runtimes. The demo below walks you through our new Terraform modules and shows how you can quickly deploy Consul in Kubernetes and VMs.

»ECS Quickstart Demo

Recently we announced support for deploying Consul service mesh on Amazon ECS. As part of that release, we also enabled users to launch a secure deployment of Consul service mesh, connecting HCP Consul servers to clients running on ECS. The demo below launches our Fakeservice application and shows how, upon deployment, users can test out managing Consul features, like intentions, using the Consul UI or CLI.

»Getting Started

Both the new Terraform module for Amazon EC2 and EKS and the HashiCorp Learn guide for Amazon ECS are now available for all users. To get started, create an account in the HCP portal and follow the respective track for the runtime of your choice. For more information about HCP Consul, please visit our documentation.