terraform-aws

Provision a Development Consul Cluster in AWS

The goal of this guide is to allows users to easily provision a development Consul cluster in just a few commands.

Reference Material

• Terraform Getting Started
• Terraform Docs
• Consul Getting Started
• Consul Docs

Estimated Time to Complete

5 minutes.

Challenge

There are many different ways to provision and configure an easily accessible development Consul cluster, making it difficult to get started.

Solution

Provision a development Consul cluster in a public subnet open to the world.

The AWS Development Consul guide is for educational purposes only. It's designed to allow you to quickly standup a single instance with Consul running in -dev mode. The single node is provisioned into a single public subnet that's completely open, allowing for easy (and insecure) access to the instance. Because Consul is running in -dev mode, all data is in-memory and not persisted to disk. If any agent fails or the node restarts, all data will be lost. This is in no way, shape, or form meant for Production use, please use with caution.

Prerequisites

• Download Terraform

Steps

We will now provision the development Consul cluster.

Step 1: Initialize

Initialize Terraform - download providers and modules.

CLI

terraform init Command

Request

$ terraform init

Response

Step 2: Plan

Run a terraform plan to ensure Terraform will provision what you expect.

CLI

terraform plan Command

Request

$ terraform plan

Response

Step 3: Apply

Run a terraform apply to provision the HashiStack. One provisioned, view the zREADME instructions output from Terraform for next steps.

CLI

terraform apply command

Request

$ terraform apply

Response

Next Steps

Now that you've provisioned and configured a development Consul cluster, start walking through the Consul Guides.