Host discovery

Traditionally, connecting to remote hosts and services requires knowledge of the endpoint’s connection info (e.g. the IP address and port of the service). This creates complexity when managing the onboarding of new resources at scale or dealing with dynamic, ephemeral services whose connection info frequently changes. Furthermore, the increased operational overhead of having to manually manage and update new or old resources is an inefficient use of time. Resources should be tagged appropriately so that, depending on their identity, users automatically have the resources that they are allowed to connect to.

Host discovery focuses on automating the process of onboarding new or changed infrastructure resources – and their connection info – to Boundary as hosts.

Automated host discovery in Boundary

Boundary supports target/host discovery in three primary workflows:

Manual configuration: Boundary administrators can manually configure static hosts and targets via the administrator UI and CLI. Manual configuration of targets with static hosts requires knowledge of the IP address or endpoint used to connect to a host.

Host discovery via configuration as code with Terraform: Boundary is fully programmatically instrumented and the discovery and configuration of new infrastructure targets can be automated with Boundary’s Terraform provider. This allows for dynamic configuration of a host and target without the need for prior knowledge of the target’s connection info.

Runtime host discovery via dynamic host catalogs: Boundary dynamic host catalogs automate the ingestion of resources from infrastructure providers into Boundary. Boundary hosts are automatically created, updated and added to host sets in order to reflect the connection information maintained in these providers. This removes the need to know host connection info or reapply infrastructure as code templates to configure new or changed resources.

Dynamic host catalogs

Dynamic host catalogs are an agentless workflow for Boundary to securely query infrastructure providers at runtime to discover and configure new services. Boundary administrators can define rules for which external resources should be ingested into the catalog by creating a host sets with an attributes filter. These filters specify which discovered hosts should be members of the host set.

Boundary currently supports dynamic host catalog for AWS and Azure and we will continue to grow this ecosystem to support additional providers.

You can get started with dynamic host catalogs for AWS here and for Azure here.