consul-minikubes

A script to create a number of Minikube clusters to test Consul.

Prerequisites

• Minikube 1.30.1
• Docker Desktop 4.19.0

Note: These scripts were previously tested with VirtualBox. However, we encounted issues with Windows and Mac. As a result, it has been refactored to use Docker.

Usage

Start a set of three clusters.

bash start.sh

You can use the -n flag to pass in any number of clusters.

bash start.sh -n 5

Note: This script will peer all clusters to each other for exploration. In production, you will only want to peer clusters with services that need to access each other for least privilege.

Clean up the clusters and networking in VirtualBox.

bash clean.sh

Explore

If you want to log into any of the Consul clusters, use ACL tokens for each Consul datacenter in .consul.state.

You will need to port-forward the Consul UI.

$ kubectl --context ${CONSUL_DATACENTER} --namespace consul port-forward svc/consul-ui 8443:443

Deploy an example set of services to dc1, dc2, and dc3.

bash example.sh

This creates a 3-tier application across multiple Consul / Kubernetes clusters.

web  ───────►  application  ────────►  database
dc1            dc2                     dc3

To test the example, port forward the web service in dc1.

$ kubectl --context dc1 port-forward svc/web 9090

Access the web service API on localhost.

$ curl http://localhost:9090

{
  "name": "web",
  "uri": "/",
  "type": "HTTP",
  "ip_addresses": [
    "10.244.0.11"
  ],
  "start_time": "2023-04-19T16:26:53.922278",
  "end_time": "2023-04-19T16:26:53.946828",
  "duration": "24.55018ms",
  "body": "Response from web",
  "upstream_calls": {
    "http://application.virtual.dc2.consul": {
      "name": "application",
      "uri": "http://application.virtual.dc2.consul",
      "type": "HTTP",
      "ip_addresses": [
        "10.244.0.11"
      ],
      "start_time": "2023-04-19T16:26:53.934568",
      "end_time": "2023-04-19T16:26:53.946412",
      "duration": "11.84421ms",
      "headers": {
        "Content-Length": "856",
        "Content-Type": "text/plain; charset=utf-8",
        "Date": "Wed, 19 Apr 2023 16:26:53 GMT"
      },
      "body": "Response from application",
      "upstream_calls": {
        "http://database.virtual.dc3.consul": {
          "name": "database",
          "uri": "http://database.virtual.dc3.consul",
          "type": "HTTP",
          "ip_addresses": [
            "10.244.0.11"
          ],
          "start_time": "2023-04-19T16:26:53.944459",
          "end_time": "2023-04-19T16:26:53.944846",
          "duration": "387.918µs",
          "headers": {
            "Content-Length": "269",
            "Content-Type": "text/plain; charset=utf-8",
            "Date": "Wed, 19 Apr 2023 16:26:53 GMT"
          },
          "body": "Response from database",
          "code": 200
        }
      },
      "code": 200
    }
  },
  "code": 200
}

Debug

If you have trouble with networking, review .minikubes.state to match the network name in Virtualbox with the Minikube profile.