spinnaker/consul

Consul & Spinnaker

This is a work in progress, and not complete yet. Please hold off on using this guide until this message disappears

Currently only the Google Spinnaker provider supports Consul. If you're interested in adding support for another platform, ping @lwander

There are two ways to use Consul + Spinnaker. The first assumes you don't have Consul running in an existing deployment, and the second assumes you do. If you fall in the first bucket, continue reading.

Configuring Consul From Scratch

This assumes you're not already using Consul for service discovery. This serves as a cursory guide, and assumes you're familiar with the fundamentals of Consul. If not, try the tutorial.

Installing Consul

If you're using Consul, Spinnaker assumes that you've taken care of installing the Consul agent on each machine you want to be discoverable. The best way to take care of this is to create a base image with Consul installed, and install further packages on top of that. To do so, copy this directory onto a VM, run $ sudo bash install/install.sh [client|server], and capture the resulting disk as an image. There are many ways to do this (Packer, config-management, etc...) and we'll leave that up to you.

IMPORTANT For spinnaker to communicate with and join Consul nodes to the network, they must provide the -client flag to Consul with an address that's reachable from the machine running Spinnaker. This is taken care of in the installation path provided here.

1. Starting your Consul Server

For Consul to work, each Consul Datacenter needs a set of server nodes, with one acting as the leader. There are a few ways to get the Consul server nodes set up, and they are detailed here.

For an easy startup path, take the base image produced by running $ sudo bash install.sh server as described above, and start a 3 node cluster. Once this cluster is running with nodes $NODE1, $NODE2, $NODE3, run $ consul join $NODE2 $NODE3 on $NODE1.

2. Starting your Consul Agents

We recommend having both the Consul binary, and a corresponding /etc/init/ entry on whatever base image you use to produce application images.

As an example, you can capture the image produced by running $ sudo bash install.sh client.

3. Configuring Spinnaker

The easiest way to allow Spinnaker to communicate with Consul is to run a Consul agent on whichever machine is running Clouddriver. The rational is that this agent will always be able to keep track of the full list of Consul nodes, providing Clouddriver with a fixed endpoint to query. Now all that's needed in clouddriver.yml is the highlighted section below

google:
  enabled: true
  accounts:
   - name: my-google-account
     consul:                         # # # # # # # # # # # # # # 
       enabled: true                 # This is the new section #
       agentEndpoint: localhost      # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
     jsonPath:  # ... configure the rest as you would normally