HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh on Kubernetes Series - Part 1 - Introduction and Setup

Modern cloud-native architectures rely heavily on microservices, and Kubernetes has become the go-to platform for deploying, managing, and scaling these distributed applications. As the number of microservices grows, ensuring secure, reliable, and observable service-to-service communication becomes increasingly complex. This is where service mesh solutions, such as HashiCorp Consul, step in to provide a seamless approach to managing these challenges. In this blog post, we will delve into the integration of HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh with Kubernetes, exploring its architecture, features, and step-by-step deployment guide.

HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh on Kubernetes Series - Part 2 - Observability

Modern service meshes require robust observability to ensure seamless operations, proactive troubleshooting, and performance optimization. In this section, we explore the observability features of HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh, including visualizing the service mesh, querying metrics, distributed tracing, and logging and auditing.

Visualizing the Service Mesh

The Consul UI is used for visualizing the service mesh and its topology.

Use the watch command to send requests to the application continually. Make sure HTTP status code 200 is returned in the output.

HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh on Kubernetes Series - Part 3 - Traffic Management

Efficient traffic management is essential for maintaining application reliability, optimizing performance, and implementing advanced deployment strategies in a service mesh. HashiCorp Consul provides powerful traffic management capabilities through service routers, splitters, and resolvers. In this section, we explore request routing, traffic shifting, request timeouts, and circuit breaking.

Request Routing

This section shows you how to route requests dynamically to multiple versions of a microservice.

The Bookinfo sample consists of four separate microservices, each with multiple versions. Three different versions of one of the microservices, reviews, have been deployed and are running concurrently. To illustrate the problem this causes, access the Bookinfo app’s /productpage in a browser and refresh several times.

Harbor Registry - Automating LDAP/S Configuration - Part 1

The Harbor Registry is involved in many of my Kubernetes implementations in the field, and in almost every implementation I am asked about the options to configure LDAP/S authentication for the registry. Unfortuntely, neither the community Helm chart nor the Tanzu Harbor package provides native inputs for this setup. Fortunately, the Harbor REST API enables LDAP configuration programmatically. Automating this process ensures consistency across environments, faster deployments, and reduced chances of human error.

Fixing Missing TKRs in Existing TKGS Deployments

I regularly check the Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR) release notes page for new updates. Yesterday, a new TKR was released with support for Kubernetes 1.28.8, and while attempting to test this new version in my TKGS environment, I realized that the TKR was not present in my environment and I started wondering why, as normally, when new TKRs are released, they immediately become available for deployment, since the vCenter is subscribed to the VMware public content library where all the TKRs are hosted. This time, that was not the case, so I started investigating.

HashiCorp Vault Intermediate CA Setup with Cert-Manager and Microsoft Root CA

In this post, we’ll explore how to set up HashiCorp Vault as an Intermediate Certificate Authority (CA) on a Kubernetes cluster, using a Microsoft CA as the Root CA. We’ll then integrate this setup with cert-manager, a powerful Kubernetes add-on for automating the management and issuance of TLS certificates.

The following is an architecture diagram for the use case I’ve built.

• A Microsoft Windows server is used as the Root CA of the environment.
• A Kubernetes cluster hosting shared/common services, including HashiCorp Vault. This is a cluster that can serve many other purposes/solutions, consumed by other clusters. The Vault server is deployed on this cluster and serves as an intermediate CA server, under the Microsoft Root CA server.
• A second Kubernetes cluster hosting the application(s). Cert-Manager is deployed on this cluster, integrated with Vault, and handles the management and issuance of TLS certificates against Vault using the ClusterIssuer resource. A web application, exposed via ingress, is running on this cluster. The ingress resource consumes its TLS certificate from Vault.

Prerequisites

• Atleast one running Kubernetes cluster. To follow along, you will need two Kubernetes clusters, one serving as the shared services cluster and the other as the workload/application cluster.
• Access to a Microsoft Root Certificate Authority (CA).
• The Helm CLI installed.
• Clone my GitHub repository. This repository contains all involved manifests, files and configurations needed.

Setting Up HashiCorp Vault as Intermediate CA

Deploy Initialize and Configure Vault

Install the Vault CLI. In the following example, Linux Ubuntu is used. If you are using a different operating system, refer to these instructions.

Using HashiCorp Vault as Ingress TLS Certificate Issuer in TAP

Using HashiCorp Vault as Ingress TLS Certificate Issuer in TAP

Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) uses Contour HTTPProxy resources to expose several web components externally via ingress. Some of these components include the API Auto Registration, API Portal, Application Live View, Metadata Store, and TAP GUI. Web workloads deployed through TAP also leverage the same method for their ingress resources. For example:

$ kubectl get httpproxy -A

NAMESPACE               NAME                                                              FQDN                                                     TLS SECRET                                               STATUS   STATUS DESCRIPTION
api-auto-registration   api-auto-registration-controller                                  api-auto-registration.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud          api-auto-registration-cert                               valid    Valid HTTPProxy
api-portal              api-portal                                                        api-portal.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud                     api-portal-tls-cert                                      valid    Valid HTTPProxy
app-live-view           appliveview                                                       appliveview.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud                    appliveview-cert                                         valid    Valid HTTPProxy
metadata-store          amr-cloudevent-handler-ingress                                    amr-cloudevent-handler.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud         amr-cloudevent-handler-ingress-cert                      valid    Valid HTTPProxy
metadata-store          amr-graphql-ingress                                               amr-graphql.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud                    amr-ingress-cert                                         valid    Valid HTTPProxy
metadata-store          metadata-store-ingress                                            metadata-store.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud                 ingress-cert                                             valid    Valid HTTPProxy
tap-demo-01             spring-petclinic-contour-76691bbb1936a7b010ca900ce58a3f57spring   spring-petclinic.tap-demo-01.svc.cluster.local                                                                    valid    Valid HTTPProxy
tap-demo-01             spring-petclinic-contour-88f827fbdc09abbb4ee2b887bba100edspring   spring-petclinic.tap-demo-01.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud   tap-demo-01/route-a4b7b2c7-0a56-48b9-ad26-6b0e06ca1925   valid    Valid HTTPProxy
tap-demo-01             spring-petclinic-contour-spring-petclinic.tap-demo-01             spring-petclinic.tap-demo-01                                                                                      valid    Valid HTTPProxy
tap-demo-01             spring-petclinic-contour-spring-petclinic.tap-demo-01.svc         spring-petclinic.tap-demo-01.svc                                                                                  valid    Valid HTTPProxy
tap-gui                 tap-gui                                                           tap-gui.tap.cloudnativeapps.cloud                        tap-gui-cert                                             valid    Valid HTTPProxy

TAP uses a shared ingress issuer as a centralized certificate authority representation, providing a method to set up TLS for the entire platform. All participating components get their ingress certificates issued by it. This is the recommended best practice for issuing ingress certificates on the platform.