F5 BIG-IP Terraform & Consul Webinar - Zero Touch App Delivery with F5, Terraform & Consul

This repository will provision BIG-IP VE (Pay as you Grow), Consul & NGINX servers in AWS

Demo

You can check out a recording of this demo here

Architecture

How to use this repo

Provision Infrastructure

The terraform directory has tf files for creating instances for consul, f5, iam policy, nginx servers with autoscale group.

main.tf refers to what region is used on aws.
ssh.tf is used to create the key pairs.
vpc.tf is used to create a new vpc and also to define the aws security groups.
outputs.tf is used to output and display F5 BIG-IP management IP and F5 BIG-IP dynamic Password

Steps

Clone the repository & change working directory to terraform

git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/f5-terraform-consul-sd-webinar
cd f5-terraform-consul-sd-webinar/terraform/

Create Terraform run
Modify terraform.tfvars.example and add a prefix to identify your resources
Rename terraform.tfvars.example to terraform.tfvars

terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply

This will create BIG-IP, consul, NGINX instances on AWS
This will also seed a terraform.tfvars file in the as3 directory for use in the next step
This step
It may take up to 5 minutes or after the run is complete for the environment to become ready. The URL for the BIG-IP UI is provided as part of the output. Verify you can reach the UI before proceeding.

Configure BIG-IP

Next we need to download and load AS3 rpm into BIG-IP, for AS3 documentation and download please refer to https://github.com/F5Networks/f5-appsvcs-extension note :- this currently uses AS3 3.7.0 rpm image

terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply

Do terraform plan & apply, this will deploy the AS3 declarative JSON for service discovery on BIG-IP. It will use as3.tf file. You can review the terraform.tfvars file that was generated in the previous step or rename and edit terraform.tfvars.example file in that directory to pass the necessary variables to terraform, or enter them manually via the CLI, copying the format of the values in the file.
Now you have Virtual IP and Pool information already configured on BIG-IP in partition defined in the consul.json file.

How to test?

You can access backend applications using http://VIP_IP:8080 where VIP_IP is the Elastic IP which maps to BIG-IP Private VIP_IP.
The NGINX servers are already in Auto scale group with consul agents running and sending all information to Consul server.
Use case is when you destroy or bring down one of the NGINX server, BIG-IP AS3 will poll the consul server and update the pool members automatically
So as the NGINX servers are going up and down the BIG-IP Pool members are updated automatically without manual intervention.
Use http://consul_public_IP:8500 to access the consul server and check the status of consul nodes count

Folder as3

Folder as3 has three files, main.tf, nginx.json and variables.tf. main.tf is used to provision nginx.json template to BIG-IP once its ready. This module attempts to download the rpom automatically, but you can also download the AS3 rpm module from https://github.com/F5Networks/f5-appsvcs-extension before doing terraform apply.

Folder scripts

consul.sh is used to install consul f5.tpl is used to change the admin password. nginx.sh is used to install consul agent on nginx servers

Product Versions

BIG-IP image used is 14.1 version
AS3 rpm used is 3.7.0 version
HashiCorp & F5 webinar based on https://clouddocs.f5.com/cloud/public/v1/aws/AWS_singleNIC.html

vinnie357 / f5-terraform-consul-sd-webinar