Vault as secrets management for Consul

22min
|
Enterprise
Consul
Vault

A secure Consul datacenter requires you to distribute a number of secrets to your Consul agents before you can perform any operations. This includes a gossip encryption key, TLS certificates for the servers, and ACL tokens for all configuration. You will also need a valid license if you use Consul Enterprise.

If you are deploying Consul on Kubernetes, you have different options to provide these secrets to your Consul agents, including:

store secrets in plain text in your configuration files. This is the most straightforward method, however, you may expose your secrets if someone compromises your Consul agents.
leverage Kubernetes secrets. This reduces some risk, but may lead to secrets or credentials sprawl as you adopt new platforms and scale your workloads.
use a secrets management system, like HashiCorp's Vault, to centrally manage and protect sensitive data (for example: tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys, and more).

Vault is HashiCorp's secrets and encryption management system that helps you securely manage secrets and protect sensitive data (for example, tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys, and more)

You can use HashiCorp Vault to authenticate your applications with a Kubernetes Service Account token. The kubernetes authentication method automatically injects a Vault token into a Kubernetes pod. This lets you use Vault to store all the other secrets, including the ones required by Consul.

In this tutorial, you will use Vault with Kubernetes to store and manage secrets required for a Consul datacenter. Then, you will use these secrets to deploy and configure the Consul datacenter on Kubernetes

Specifically you will:

Configure Vault secrets engines to store and generate Consul secrets.
Configure Kubernetes authentication engine for Vault. This lets you authenticate using a Kubernetes service account.
Configure the Consul helm chart to retrieve the secrets from Vault during deploy.
Deploy Consul on Kubernetes and verify the deployment completes correctly.

The following architecture diagram depicts the desired outcome.

Architectural diagram for Vault as Consul secrets manager

Prerequisites

You can configure the scenario to deploy either Consul OSS or Consul Enterprise. Select your learning path by clicking one of the following tabs.

kubectl to interact with your Kubernetes cluster.
Vault (CLI) to interact with your Vault cluster
jq to manipulate json output
An AWS account with AWS Credentials configured for use with Terraform.
An HCP account configured for use with Terraform
The Terraform 1.0.6+ CLI installed locally.
git to clone the code repository locally
helm v3.2.1+ to deploy Consul and Vault agent injector.

Note

Some of the infrastructure in this tutorial may not qualify for the AWS free tier. Destroy the infrastructure at the end of the guide to avoid unnecessary charges. We are not responsible for any charges that you incur.

Deploy Kubernetes and Vault

The scenario requires a Kubernetes cluster deployed, either locally or on a Cloud provider, and a Vault cluster deployed, either on the Kubernetes cluster or on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP).

The tutorial provides example code and steps for a scenario using HCP Vault Dedicated and an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Cluster.

Deploy HCP Vault Dedicated cluster and EKS cluster

To begin, clone the repository. This repository contains all the Terraform configuration required to complete this tutorial.

$ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp-education/learn-consul-kubernetes

Navigate into the repository folder.

$ cd learn-consul-kubernetes

Fetch the tags from the git remote server, and checkout the tag for this tutorial.

$ git fetch --all --tags && git checkout tags/v0.0.23

Navigate into the project folder for this tutorial.

$ cd hcp-vault-eks

The Terraform configuration deploys an Vault Dedicated Cluster, an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Cluster, and the underlying networking components for HCP and AWS to communicate with each other.

Initialize the Terraform project.

$ terraform init

Terraform has been successfully initialized!

You may now begin working with Terraform. Try running "terraform plan" to see
any changes that are required for your infrastructure. All Terraform commands
should now work.

If you ever set or change modules or backend configuration for Terraform,
rerun this command to reinitialize your working directory. If you forget, other
commands will detect it and remind you to do so if necessary.

Apply the configuration to deploy the resources. Respond yes to the prompt to confirm.

$ terraform apply
##...

Plan: 76 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.

Changes to Outputs:
  + eks_data                 = (sensitive value)
  + oidc_provider_arn        = (known after apply)
  + service_account_role_arn = (known after apply)
  + vault_auth_data          = (sensitive value)

Do you want to perform these actions?
  Terraform will perform the actions described above.
  Only 'yes' will be accepted to approve.

  Enter a value:

The deployment can take up to 20 minutes to complete. When Terraform completes successfully, it will display something similar to the following outputs:

##...

Apply complete! Resources: 76 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Outputs:

eks_data = <sensitive>
oidc_provider_arn = "arn:aws:iam::************:oidc-provider/oidc.eks.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/id/************************"
service_account_role_arn = "arn:aws:iam::************:role/tutorialclustertest"
vault_auth_data = <sensitive>

The Terraform configuration configures your local kubectl so you can interact with the deployed Amazon EKS cluster.

$ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
NAMESPACE     NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system   aws-node-4zhlh             1/1     Running   0          19m
kube-system   aws-node-8zt67             1/1     Running   0          18m
kube-system   aws-node-h77xb             1/1     Running   0          19m
kube-system   coredns-66cb55d4f4-hrzdg   1/1     Running   0          26m
kube-system   coredns-66cb55d4f4-n7nqw   1/1     Running   0          26m
kube-system   kube-proxy-2jlxt           1/1     Running   0          20m
kube-system   kube-proxy-57lg2           1/1     Running   0          20m
kube-system   kube-proxy-7w449           1/1     Running   0          20m

Setup your environment to interact with Vault

Once the Vault Dedicated instance is deployed, use the vault CLI to interact with it.

Use the output from the terraform apply command to retrieve the info for your Vault Dedicated cluster.

First, configure Vault Dedicated token for your environment.

$ export VAULT_TOKEN=`terraform output -json vault_auth_data | jq --raw-output .vault_token`

Next, configure the Vault endpoint for your environment, using the public address of the Vault Dedicated instance.

$ export VAULT_ADDR=`terraform output -json vault_auth_data | \
    jq --raw-output .cluster_host | \
    sed 's/private/public/'`

Security note

Using an HCP Vault Dedicated cluster with a public endpoint is not recommended for use in production. Read more in the HCP Vault Dedicated Security Overview.

Your Vault Dedicated instance is also exposed on a private address accessible from your AWS resources, in this case an EKS cluster, over the HVN peering connection. You will use this address to configure the Kubernetes integration with Vault.

$ export VAULT_PRIVATE_ADDR=`terraform output -json vault_auth_data | \
    jq --raw-output .cluster_host`

Finally, since Vault Dedicated uses namespaces, set the VAULT_NAMESPACE environment variable to admin.

$ export VAULT_NAMESPACE=admin

Install Vault agent injector on Amazon EKS

Create a vault-values.yaml file that sets the external servers to Vault Dedicated. This will deploy a Vault agent injector into the EKS cluster.

$ cat > vault-values.yaml << EOF
injector:
  enabled: true
  externalVaultAddr: "${VAULT_PRIVATE_ADDR}"
EOF

To get more info on the available helm values configuration options, check Helm Chart Configuration page.

Validate that the values file is populated correctly. You should find the Vault Dedicated private address in the file.

$ cat vault-values.yaml
injector:
   enabled: true
   externalVaultAddr: "https://vault-cluster.private.vault.00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.aws.hashicorp.cloud:8200"

You will use the official vault-helm chart to install the Vault agents to your EKS cluster.

Add the HashiCorp's Helm chart repository.

$ helm repo add hashicorp https://helm.releases.hashicorp.com && helm repo update
"hashicorp" has been added to your repositories
Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
...Successfully got an update from the "hashicorp" chart repository
Update Complete. ⎈ Happy Helming!⎈

Install the HashiCorp Vault Helm chart.

$ helm install vault -f ./vault-values.yaml hashicorp/vault --version "0.20.0"
NAME: vault
LAST DEPLOYED: Wed Mar 30 14:27:06 2022
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None
NOTES:
Thank you for installing HashiCorp Vault!

Now that you have deployed Vault, you should look over the docs on using
Vault with Kubernetes available here:

https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/

Your release is named vault. To learn more about the release, try:

  $ helm status vault
  $ helm get manifest vault

Once the installation is complete, verify the Vault agent injector pod deploys by issuing kubectl get pods.

$ kubectl get pods
NAME                                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
vault-agent-injector-6c6bbb9785-p7x4n   1/1     Running   0          8s

At this point, Vault is ready to use and for you to configure it as the secret manager for Consul.

Configure Vault as Consul secret manager

You will need to generate tokens for the different nodes and servers to securely configure Consul. In order to generate these tokens, you will need a key for gossip encryption, a Consul Enterprise license, TLS certificates for the Consul servers and ACL policies

Since you are using Vault as secrets management for your Consul datacenter, all the secrets will be stored inside Vault.

Vault provides a kv secrets engine that can be used to store arbitrary secrets. You will use this engine to store the encryption key and the enterprise license.

First, enable key/value v2 secrets engine (kv-v2).

$ vault secrets enable -path=consul kv-v2
Success! Enabled the kv-v2 secrets engine at: consul/

Store enterprise license in Vault

If you want to deploy Consul Enterprise, store the license for Consul enterprise.

Place your Consul Enterprise license into the folder, from wherever you currently store it, and name it consul.hclic.

$ cp /path/to/your/current/consul-ent/license consul.hclic

Store the license in Vault.

$ vault kv put consul/secret/enterpriselicense key="$(cat ./consul.hclic)"
Key                Value
---                -----
created_time       2022-03-22T16:25:14.073090874Z
custom_metadata    <nil>
deletion_time      n/a
destroyed          false
version            1

Store Consul gossip key in Vault

Once the secret engine is enabled, store the encryption key in Vault.

$ vault kv put consul/secret/gossip gossip="$(consul keygen)"
Key              Value
---              -----
created_time     2022-03-16T18:18:52.389731147Z
deletion_time    n/a
destroyed        false
version          1

Setup PKI secrets engine for TLS and service mesh CA

Vault provides a pki secrets engine that you can use to generate TLS certificates. You will use this engine to configure CAs for TLS encryption for servers and service mesh leaf certificates for services.

Enable Vault's PKI secrets engine at the pki path.

$ vault secrets enable pki
Success! Enabled the pki secrets engine at: pki/

You can tune the PKI secrets engine to issue certificates with a maximum time-to-live (TTL). In this tutorial, you will set a TTL of 10 years (87600 hours).

$ vault secrets tune -max-lease-ttl=87600h pki
Success! Tuned the secrets engine at: pki/

Generate the root certificate for Consul CA. This command saves the certificate in a file named consul_ca.crt. You will use it to configure environment variables for Consul CLI when you need to interact with your Consul datacenter.

$ vault write -field=certificate pki/root/generate/internal \
    common_name="dc1.consul" \
    ttl=87600h | tee consul_ca.crt

Note

This command sets common_name to dc1.consul, which matches the Consul datacenter and domain configuration. If you are deploying Consul with different datacenter and domain values, use the common_name="<datacenter.domain>" schema to generate the certificate.

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Next, create a role that defines the configuration for the certificates.

$ vault write pki/roles/consul-server \
    allowed_domains="dc1.consul,consul-server,consul-server.consul,consul-server.consul.svc" \
    allow_subdomains=true \
    allow_bare_domains=true \
    allow_localhost=true \
    generate_lease=true \
    max_ttl="720h"

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Data written to: pki/roles/consul-server

Note

This command sets common_name to dc1.consul, which matches the Consul datacenter and domain configuration. If you are deploying Consul with different datacenter and domain values, use values that reflect the allowed domains for the consul-server pki role.

Finally, enable Vault's PKI secrets engine at the connect-root path to be used as root CA for Consul service mesh.

$ vault secrets enable -path connect-root pki
Success! Enabled the pki secrets engine at: connect-root/

Configure Kubernetes authentication

Vault provides a Kubernetes authentication method that enables clients to authenticate with a Kubernetes Service Account Token.

Using the Kubernetes authentication, Vault identifies your Consul agents using their service account and gives them access to the secrets they need to join your Consul datacenter.

Enable the Kubernetes authentication method.

$ vault auth enable kubernetes
Success! Enabled kubernetes auth method at: kubernetes/

Vault accepts service tokens from any client from within the Kubernetes cluster. During authentication, Vault verifies that the service account token is valid by querying a configured Kubernetes endpoint. In order to do that, configure the Kubernetes auth method with the JSON web token (JWT) for the service account, the Kubernetes CA certificate, and the Kubernetes host URL.

The chart configures a Kubernetes service account named vault that you will use to enable Vault communication with Kubernetes. Retrieve the JSON Web Token (JWT) for the vault service account and set it to the token_reviewer_jwt environment variable.

$ export token_reviewer_jwt=$(kubectl get secret \
  $(kubectl get serviceaccount vault -o jsonpath='{.secrets[0].name}') \
  -o jsonpath='{ .data.token }' | base64 --decode)

Retrieve the Kubernetes certificate authority for the service account and set it to the kubernetes_ca_cert environment variable.

$ export kubernetes_ca_cert=$(kubectl get secret \
  $(kubectl get serviceaccount vault -o jsonpath='{.secrets[0].name}') \
  -o jsonpath='{ .data.ca\.crt }' | base64 --decode)

Retrieve the Kubernetes cluster endpoint and set it to the kubernetes_host_url environment variable.

$ export kubernetes_host_url=$(kubectl config view --raw --minify --flatten \
  -o jsonpath='{.clusters[].cluster.server}')

Configure the Vault Kubernetes auth method to use the service account token.

$ vault write auth/kubernetes/config \
  token_reviewer_jwt="${token_reviewer_jwt}" \
  kubernetes_host="${kubernetes_host_url}" \
  kubernetes_ca_cert="${kubernetes_ca_cert}"

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Data written to: auth/kubernetes/config

Verify the configuration for the Kubernetes auth method changed in Vault.

$ vault read auth/kubernetes/config
Key                       Value
---                       -----
disable_iss_validation    true
disable_local_ca_jwt      false
issuer                    n/a
kubernetes_ca_cert        -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
##...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
kubernetes_host           https://66606BBB5881313742471313182BBB90999.gr7.us-east-1.eks.amazonaws.com
pem_keys                  []

Generate Vault policies

Next, you must define the different Vault policies that will let the Consul agents generate or retrieve the different secrets.

You will create Vault policies to grant access to:

The gossip encryption key.
Consul server policy.
Consul CA access policy.
Consul service mesh CA policy.
Optionally, if you are using Consul Enterprise, Consul enterprise license.

Gossip encryption key

Earlier in the tutorial, you stored the gossip encryption in the Vault kv secret engine. Define a policy that grants access to the path where you stored the gossip encryption.

$ vault policy write gossip-policy - <<EOF
path "consul/data/secret/gossip" {
  capabilities = ["read"]
}
EOF

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Uploaded policy: gossip-policy

Consul enterprise license

When using Consul Enterprise, you must distribute the license to your Consul nodes. Earlier in this tutorial, you stored the Consul license in the Vault kv secrets engine. Define a policy that grants access to the path where you stored the license.

$ vault policy write enterpriselicense-policy - <<EOF
path "consul/data/secret/enterpriselicense" {
  capabilities = ["read"]
}
EOF

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Uploaded policy: enterpriselicense-policy

Consul server policy

Consul servers need to generate TLS certificates (pki/issue/consul-server) and retrieve the CA certificate (pki/cert/ca).

$ vault policy write consul-server - <<EOF
path "kv/data/consul-server"
{
  capabilities = ["read"]
}
path "pki/issue/consul-server"
{
  capabilities = ["read","update"]
}
path "pki/cert/ca"
{
  capabilities = ["read"]
}
EOF

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Uploaded policy: consul-server

Consul CA access policy

The policy ca-policy grants access to the Consul root CA so that Consul agents and services can verify the certificates used in the service mesh are authentic.

$ vault policy write ca-policy - <<EOF
path "pki/cert/ca" {
  capabilities = ["read"]
}
EOF

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Uploaded policy: ca-policy

Consul service mesh CA policy

The following Vault policy allows Consul to create and manage the root and intermediate PKI secrets engines for generating service mesh certificates. If you would prefer to control PKI secrets engine creation and configuration from Vault rather than delegating full control to Consul, refer to the Vault CA provider documentation.

The following Vault policy applies to Consul 1.12 and later. For use with earlier Consul versions, refer to the Vault CA provider documentation and select your version from the version dropdown.

In this example, the RootPKIPath is connect-root and the IntermediatePKIPath is connect-intermediate-dc1. Update these values to reflect your environment.

$ vault policy write connect - <<EOF
path "/sys/mounts/connect-root" {
  capabilities = [ "create", "read", "update", "delete", "list" ]
}

path "/sys/mounts/connect-intermediate-dc1" {
  capabilities = [ "create", "read", "update", "delete", "list" ]
}

path "/sys/mounts/connect-intermediate-dc1/tune" {
  capabilities = [ "update" ]
}

path "/connect-root/*" {
  capabilities = [ "create", "read", "update", "delete", "list" ]
}

path "/connect-intermediate-dc1/*" {
  capabilities = [ "create", "read", "update", "delete", "list" ]
}

path "auth/token/renew-self" {
  capabilities = [ "update" ]
}

path "auth/token/lookup-self" {
  capabilities = [ "read" ]
}
EOF

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Uploaded policy: connect

Configure Kubernetes authentication roles in Vault

You have configured the Kubernetes authentication method and defined the different policies to grant access to the resources. You can now define the associations between Kubernetes service accounts and Vault policies.

You will create Vault roles to associate the necessary policies to:

Consul server agents.
Consul client agents.
Consul CA certificate access.

Consul server role

Create a Kubernetes authentication role in Vault named consul-server that connects the Kubernetes service account (consul-server) and namespace (consul) with the Vault policies: gossip-policy,consul-server and connect. The tokens returned after authentication are valid for 24 hours.

$ vault write auth/kubernetes/role/consul-server \
    bound_service_account_names=consul-server \
    bound_service_account_namespaces=consul \
    policies="gossip-policy,consul-server,connect" \
    ttl=24h

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Data written to: auth/kubernetes/role/consul-server

When using Consul Enterprise, you must also associate the role with the enterpriselicense-policy.

$ vault write auth/kubernetes/role/consul-server \
    bound_service_account_names=consul-server \
    bound_service_account_namespaces=consul \
    policies="gossip-policy,consul-server,connect,enterpriselicense-policy" \
    ttl=24h

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Data written to: auth/kubernetes/role/consul-server

Consul client role

Create a Kubernetes authentication role in Vault named consul-client that connects the Kubernetes service account (consul-client) and namespace (consul) with the Vault policies: gossip-policy and ca-policy. The tokens returned after authentication are valid for 24 hours.

$ vault write auth/kubernetes/role/consul-client \
    bound_service_account_names=consul-client \
    bound_service_account_namespaces=consul \
    policies="gossip-policy,ca-policy" \
    ttl=24h

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Data written to: auth/kubernetes/role/consul-client

When using Consul Enterprise, you must also associate the role with the enterpriselicense-policy.

$ vault write auth/kubernetes/role/consul-client \
    bound_service_account_names=consul-client \
    bound_service_account_namespaces=consul \
    policies="gossip-policy,ca-policy,enterpriselicense-policy" \
    ttl=24h

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Data written to: auth/kubernetes/role/consul-client

Define access to Consul CA root certificate

Create a Kubernetes authentication role in Vault named consul-ca that connects all Kubernetes service account in namespace (consul) with the Vault policy ca-policy. The tokens returned after authentication are valid for 1 hour.

$ vault write auth/kubernetes/role/consul-ca \
    bound_service_account_names="*" \
    bound_service_account_namespaces=consul \
    policies=ca-policy \
    ttl=1h

The command should return an output similar to the following.

Success! Data written to: auth/kubernetes/role/consul-ca

With the creation of the roles you completed the Vault configuration necessary. The following diagram provides a summary of the configuration you created.

Permissions for Vault as Consul secrets manager

Deploy Consul datacenter

Now that you have completed configuring Vault, you are ready to deploy Consul datacenter on the Kubernetes cluster.

The repository contains a configuration file for your Helm chart, named consul-values.yaml.

Open the file and modify the configuration to use your $VAULT_PRIVATE_ADDR.

$ vim consul-values.yaml

Note

Content should resemble the example below. This example is not guaranteed to be up to date. Always refer to the values file provided in the repository.

global:
  datacenter: "dc1"
  name: consul
  domain: consul
  secretsBackend:
    vault:
      enabled: true
      consulServerRole: consul-server
      consulClientRole: consul-client
      consulCARole: consul-ca
      connectCA:
        address: $VAULT_PRIVATE_ADDR
        rootPKIPath: connect-root/
        intermediatePKIPath: connect-intermediate-dc1/
        additionalConfig: "{\"connect\": [{ \"ca_config\": [{ \"namespace\": \"admin\"}]}]}"
      agentAnnotations: |
        "vault.hashicorp.com/namespace": "admin"
##...

To get more info on the available Helm values configuration options, check out the Helm Chart Configuration page.

Once the configuration is complete, install Consul on your EKS cluster.

$ helm install --namespace consul --create-namespace \
               --wait \
               --values ./consul-values.yaml  \
               consul hashicorp/consul --version "0.44.0"

The repository contains a configuration file for your Helm chart, named consul-ent-values.yaml.

Open the file and modify the configuration to use your $VAULT_PRIVATE_ADDR.

$ vim consul-values.yaml

Note

Content should resemble the example below. This example is not guaranteed to be up to date. Always refer to the values file provided in the repository.

global:
  datacenter: "dc1"
  name: consul
  domain: consul
  image: hashicorp/consul-enterprise:1.12-ent
  secretsBackend:
    vault:
      enabled: true
      consulServerRole: consul-server
      consulClientRole: consul-client
      consulCARole: consul-ca
      connectCA:
        address: $VAULT_PRIVATE_ADDR
        rootPKIPath: connect-root/
        intermediatePKIPath: connect-intermediate-dc1/
        additionalConfig: "{\"connect\": [{ \"ca_config\": [{ \"namespace\": \"admin\"}]}]}"
      agentAnnotations: |
        "vault.hashicorp.com/namespace": "admin"
  enterpriseLicense:
    secretName: 'consul/data/secret/enterpriselicense'
    secretKey: 'key'
##...

To get more info on the available Helm values configuration options, check out the Helm Chart Configuration page.

Once the configuration is complete, install Consul on your EKS cluster.

$ helm install --namespace consul --create-namespace \
               --wait \
               --values ./consul-ent-values.yaml  \
               consul hashicorp/consul --version "0.44.0"

The deployment can take up to 10 minutes to complete. When finished, you will get something similar to the following:

## ...
NOTES:
Thank you for installing HashiCorp Consul!

Your release is named consul.

To learn more about the release, run:

  $ helm status consul
  $ helm get all consul

Consul on Kubernetes Documentation:
https://www.consul.io/docs/platform/k8s

Consul on Kubernetes CLI Reference:
https://www.consul.io/docs/k8s/k8s-cli

Verify configuration

Once the installation is complete, verify all the Consul pods are running using kubectl.

$ kubectl get pods --namespace consul
NAME                                           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
consul-client-5zpkg                            2/2     Running   0          3m46s
consul-client-q7ch8                            2/2     Running   0          3m46s
consul-client-qtts7                            2/2     Running   0          3m46s
consul-connect-injector-746cd866b-zc5l2        2/2     Running   0          3m46s
consul-controller-5b5d5b8f8-qmgnc              2/2     Running   0          3m46s
consul-ingress-gateway-74b88fb69f-dr9x2        3/3     Running   0          3m46s
consul-ingress-gateway-74b88fb69f-kv59b        3/3     Running   0          3m46s
consul-server-0                                2/2     Running   0          3m45s
consul-sync-catalog-bd69d7565-8tfcz            2/2     Running   0          3m46s
consul-terminating-gateway-55cc569ddf-5wvnd    3/3     Running   0          3m45s
consul-terminating-gateway-55cc569ddf-lp9kl    3/3     Running   0          3m45s
consul-webhook-cert-manager-5bb49457bf-7n82w   1/1     Running   0          3m46s
prometheus-server-5cbddcc44b-67z8n             2/2     Running   0          2m12s

The configuration enables Consul UI as a service in your EKS cluster.

Retrieve the address from Kubernetes services.

$ kubectl get services --namespace consul --field-selector metadata.name=consul-ui
NAME        TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP                                                               PORT(S)         AGE
consul-ui   LoadBalancer   10.100.72.81   abe45f34b066541f68a625ac1d3e0cfe-1763109037.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com   443:32597/TCP   23h

Access the Consul UI using the consul-ui external address on port 443.

Consul UI on services tab

Clean up environment

Now that you are finished with the tutorial, clean up your environment. Respond yes to the prompt to confirm

$ terraform destroy
Plan: 0 to add, 0 to change, 76 to destroy.

Changes to Outputs:
  - eks_data                 = (sensitive value)
  - oidc_provider_arn        = "arn:aws:iam::561656980159:oidc-provider/oidc.eks.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/id/D9338D6BDF23CFD3E878411B2BA34870" -> null
  - service_account_role_arn = "arn:aws:iam::561656980159:role/tutorialclustertest" -> null
  - vault_auth_data          = (sensitive value)

Do you really want to destroy all resources?
  Terraform will destroy all your managed infrastructure, as shown above.
  There is no undo. Only 'yes' will be accepted to confirm.

  Enter a value: yes

Next steps

Using Vault as a centralized secret management, you can simplify your Consul deployments and avoid secret sprawl across multiple Kubernetes instances. Vault helps you scale your deployments without having to trade off between security and manageability.

In this tutorial you learned how to use Vault as secret manager for your Consul datacenter installed in Kubernetes.

Specifically you:

Configured Vault secrets engines to store or generate Consul secrets.
Configured Kubernetes auth engine for Vault to allow authentication using a k8s service account.
Configured Consul helm chart to retrieve the secrets from Vault during deploy.
Deployed Consul on Kubernetes and verify that secrets are being generated or retrieved from Vault.

You can read more on Consul Helm chart configuration value, to tune your Consul installation at Helm Chart Configuration.

To learn more on Vault Kubernetes authentication check Vault Agent with Kubernetes and HCP Vault Dedicated with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

Consul ACLs with Vault

Next Collection

VM production patterns

This tutorial also appears in:

7 tutorials

Integrations - Vault
Integrate with Vault to enforce security best practices.
- Consul