Consul Ansible Vagrant

Overview

This project will setup Consul and demonstrate it's service discovery.

The Vagrant file will boot a 3 node consul cluster (node1, node2 and node3) and a client (client1). The client has the consul web ui installed and an example service (Nginx).

Setup

The following steps require that you have Ansible, Vagrant and VirtualBox installed.

You can find instructions to install these programs below:

Once you have the above setup you can start the machines using vagrant:

vagrant up

This will create the 4 machines and the configure the software on them using Ansible.

WebUI

The Consul webui is available at 192.168.20.13:8500/ui/

DNS

You can also query Consul to see what services are running using DNS.

You can see what servers have nginx running using the following command:

dig @192.168.20.11 -p 8600 nginx.service.vagrant.consul. ANY

You can check also check on the consul service using:

dig @192.168.20.10 -p 8600 consul.service.vagrant.consul. ANY

Compatability

This has only been tested with Vagrant v1.7.2 and Virtualbox v4.3.20 running on a Linux host. Ansible was installed using pip into a virtaulenv (see requirements.txt for exact version).

Known Issues and Limitations

Due to hardware limitations I have not been able to test with multiple client machines. However if you add additional client machines to the Vagrantfile and put them in the 'consul_client' group, boot them using
```
vagrant up client2
```
Then provision with
```
vagrant provision node1
```
it should "just work" (tm). If you look in the WebUI or query via dig you should now see both the client machines.

Note - All of the provisioning is done via node1 so that we can use the Ansible facts from the other groups and Ansible parallel execution. See the Ansible section of the Vagrant Docs.
There is important data in Ansible group_vars that should be encrypted this is a limitation of this demo.
The consul ui accepting all connections this is a potential security risk but also a limitation of the demo.
Hardcoded details (network adapter to bind to, etc) required to make sure the demo works.
Probably should have just used a module of the Ansible Galaxy. I used this as an excuse to also learn Ansible so I am not sure how to judge the quality of modules on the Ansible Galaxy.

External Documentation

Consul Docs