Use case
Network infrastructure automation
Automate key networking tasks such as updating load-balancer member pools or applying firewall policies.
Challenge
Manual networking tasks
New technologies have recently emerged to help accelerate application deployment. However, legacy systems and old practices cannot keep up with the rate of change in modern applications. If an event occurs that auto-scales additional service instances, networking and security teams are often still dealing with manual ticket-driven processes that can slow solution delivery and increase the likelihood of misconfiguration.
Solution
Network infrastructure automation
Adopting network infrastructure automation (NIA) with Consul-Terraform-Sync ensures networking and security infrastructure safely adapts to changes. Consul-Terraform-Sync automates various networking tasks and workflows based on changes observed by Consul and managed through Terraform. The tasks can be triggered by different events like the scaling of service instances, change of service address or port number, updates to service tags, meta or health, etc. This leads to improved delivery times and greatly reduces the chances of misconfigurations.
Achieving networking infrastructure automation with HashiCorp Consul-Terraform-Sync
When talking about the “shift to cloud”, the focus tends to be on the applications. What is often overlooked is the underlying complexity and demand this puts on network teams looking for ways to improve their processes and efficiency in managing networks in the cloud. HashiCorp Consul is a service networking solution that aims to solve these challenges through a new tool called Consul-Terraform-Sync. CTS leverages Terraform and its robust provider ecosystem to achieve network infrastructure automation and reduce the need for manual processes.
Resources
Tutorials
Network infrastructure automation with Consul-Terraform Sync
Automate updates to network infrastructure including dynamic load balancing and firewall rules with Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS).
Use Terraform to register external services
Register external services with Consul using the Terraform Consul provider.
Use application load balancers for blue-green and canary deployments
Configure AWS application load balancers to release an application in a rolling upgrade with near-zero downtime.
Network Automation: Consul and Terraform
In this video, HashiCorp Co-Founder and CTO Armon Dadgar explains how Consul and Terraform can eliminate the reliance of ticket-based systems, which can take weeks or days to execute, through Network Infrastructure Automation (NIA) with Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS).