terraform-aws

Provision a Best Practices Vault Cluster in AWS

The goal of this guide is to allows users to easily provision a best practices Vault & Consul cluster in just a few commands.

Reference Material

• Terraform Getting Started
• Terraform Docs
• Consul Getting Started
• Consul Docs
• Vault Getting Started
• Vault Docs

Estimated Time to Complete

5 minutes.

Challenge

There are many different ways to provision and configure an easily accessible best practices Vault & Consul cluster, making it difficult to get started.

Solution

Provision a best practices Vault & Consul cluster in a private network with a bastion host.

The AWS Best Practices Vault guide provisions a 3 node Vault and 3 node Consul cluster with a similar architecture to the Quick Start guide. The difference is this guide will setup TLS/encryption across Vault & Consul and depends on pre-built images rather than runtime configuration. You can find the Packer templates to create the Consul image and Vault image in the Guides Configuration Repo.

Prerequisites

• Download Terraform

Steps

We will now provision the best practices Vault cluster.

Step 1: Initialize

Initialize Terraform - download providers and modules.

CLI

terraform init Command

Request

$ terraform init

Response

Step 2: Plan

Run a terraform plan to ensure Terraform will provision what you expect.

CLI

terraform plan Command

Request

$ terraform plan

Response

Step 3: Apply

Run a terraform apply to provision the HashiStack. One provisioned, view the zREADME instructions output from Terraform for next steps.

CLI

terraform apply command

Request

$ terraform apply

Response

Next Steps

Now that you've provisioned and configured a best practices Vault & Consul cluster, start walking through the Vault Guides.