Managing Microservice Deployments on AWS with HashiCorp Consul

Developer advocates Nathan Peck (AWS) and Anubhav Mishra (HashiCorp) join forces in this video to briefly introduce container orchestration services such as AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Fargate, along with HashiCorp's service discovery and service mesh tool, Consul. After those introductions, Nathan and Mishra run a demo showcasing Consul's ability to securely connect AWS and non-AWS services.

Previously, enabling these connections required a great deal of manual configurations and oversight which prevented users from taking full advantage of the scaling capabilities that that cloud offers. HashiCorp Consul, through features such as Consul Connect, help eliminate some of these challenges.

HashiCorp Consul has a number of integrations with AWS services, including: Amazon EC2, AWS CloudMap, and AWS Fargate. This demo will show you how to accelerate the migration to microservices across public cloud and on-premise datacenters using Consul and AWS.

Outline:

0:00 — Introduction to container orchestration and AWS ECS

8:10 — Introduction to HashiCorp Consul, its deployment, and its advantages over load balancers

23:20 — Demo: Container-to-container communication on AWS with Consul Connect (Step by step tutorial)

31:20 — Demo: Consul and AWS Cloud Map

44:50 — Q&A

Q&A

1. For AWS: Is there an ETA for Windows nodes Fargate?
2. Should the Consul servers be backed by a load balancer for high availability since it may become a single point of failure? What is the recommended approach?
3. How are the certificates for mutual TLS managed? Are they self-signed and rotated on a given frequency?
4. I'm currently using EKS with Istio mostly for mTLS, but we are also using other Istio features, what is the benefit of using Fargate and Consul instead of EKS with Istio?
5. Is Consul Connect a replacement for Linkerd?
6. If the Consul Connect sidecar proxy fails, how is the outage handled? Can the client be made more “HA”?
7. Are there Terraform templates for spinning up Consul? (in addition to/instead of CloudFormation)
8. What happened to Nomad? does this replace it?
9. Can Consul's dashboard show observability metrics for Consul Connect?
10. What's the status of the Envoy proxy with Connect?
11. Do Consul agents (client) have the option to auto-update e.g. if a new version of Consul client is released e.g. via a new docker image?
12. Migrating to ACL Consul from Non ACL. Is it possible without downtime Can we initiate gossip call manual/api if a agent is joined in cluster Consul discover over AWS using tags taking more time, what s the best approach/diagnose the backend? 13.Resource discovery - Does Consul discover traditional network devices? If so, any specific protocol used to discover the traditional network devices like Cisco/Arista?