terraform-aws

Provision a Quick Start Vault Cluster in AWS

The goal of this guide is to allows users to easily provision a quick start 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 quick start Vault & Consul cluster, making it difficult to get started.

Solution

Provision a quick start Vault & Consul cluster in a private network with a bastion host.

The AWS Quick Start Vault guide leverages the scripts in the Guides Configuration Repo to do runtime configuration for Vault & Consul. Although using curl bash at runtime is not best practices, this makes it quick and easy to standup a Vault & Consul cluster with no external dependencies like pre-built images. This guide will also forgo setting up TLS/encryption on Vault & Consul for the sake of simplicity.

Prerequisites

• Download Terraform

Steps

We will now provision the quick start Vault & Consul clusters.

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 quick start Vault & Consul cluster, start walking through the Vault Guides.