HCP Consul Dedicated cluster overview

This topic provides an overview for using HCP Consul Dedicated server clusters in your Consul deployment.

For more information about HCP Consul Dedicated clusters and how they differ from self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters, refer to cluster management.

Introduction

Creating a HCP Consul Dedicated cluster simplifies the overall process of bootstrapping Consul servers. Additional cluster maintenance operations are also simplified through HCP Consul Central. The HCP platform automates the following parts of a cluster's lifecycle:

• Generating and distributing a gossip key between servers
• Starting the certificate authority and distributing TLS certificates to servers
• Bootstrapping the ACL system and saving tokens to a secure Vault environment
• Rotating expired TLS certificates after expiration
• Upgrading servers to new versions of Consul

Workflow

To get started with HCP Consul Dedicated clusters, complete the following tasks in order:

1. Create an HVN and connect it to your cloud environment. This task prepares your network so that you can establish communication between the Consul servers, which are hosted in a HCP Consul Dedicated environment, and your services, which are hosted in a user-managed environment. Refer to Create and Manage an HVN for more information.
2. Create an HCP Consul Dedicated cluster. You can choose between using a guided UI workflow or generating an end-to-end Terraform configuration.
3. Get credentials and URLs to access the cluster. HCP generates an admin token that you can use to view the Consul UI or make calls to the Consul HTTP API.
4. Depending on whether you use VMs or Kubernetes, deploy Consul clients or deploy Consul dataplanes and register your services with the cluster.
5. Create and apply service intentions to secure communication in the service mesh. For additional guidance, refer to Create and manage intentions in the Consul documentation.

Next steps

After you deploy HCP Consul Dedicated clusters and register services with them, consider taking the following actions:

• Link a self-managed Community or Enterprise cluster to HCP Consul Central so that information about HCP Consul Dedicated and self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters are available from a central location. Linking a self-managed Community or Enterprise cluster is not required to use HCP Consul Dedicated.
• Extend your network's service mesh by creating WAN federation or cluster peering connections between clusters. These operations can prepare your services to failover to other clusters in the event of an outage.
• Use HCP Consul Central to monitor your network and get additional insights into the state of your clusters and their registered services. We automatically deploy a telemetry collector when you create an HCP Consul Dedicated cluster, providing observability into server and proxy operations.

Guidance

The following resources are available to help you use HCP Consul Dedicated clusters.

Concepts and reference

• Cluster management explains the difference between HCP Consul Dedicated clusters and self-managed Community and Enterprise clusters.
• Cluster tiers explains how the tier you select when creating a HCP Consul Dedicated cluster determines its multi-cloud functionality.
• Cluster configuration reference provides reference information about cluster properties, including the ports HCP Consul Dedicated clusters listen on.

Tutorials

• Deploy HCP Consul Dedicated demonstrates the end-to-end deployment for a development tier cluster using the automated Terraform workflow.
• The following tutorials demonstrate the process to create an HVN and connect it to your cloud environment:
  • Hashicorp Virtual Network on Amazon Web Services
  • Hashicorp Virtual Network on Microsoft Azure
• The following tutorials demonstrate the process to deploy clients for services running on virtual machines:
  • Connect a Consul client to AWS VM
  • Connect a Consul client to Azure VM
• The following tutorials demonstrate the process to deploy dataplanes for services running on Kubernetes using Terraform:
  • Create HCP Consul Dedicated cluster for an existing EKS runtime
  • Deploy HCP Consul Dedicated with EKS using Terraform
  • Deploy HCP Consul Dedicated with AKS using Terraform
• The following tutorials demonstrate the process to connect to services running in a Kubernetes using Helm:
  • Connect an Elastic Kubernetes Service Cluster to HCP Consul Dedicated
  • Connect an Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster to HCP Consul Dedicated

Usage documentation

• Create an HCP Consul Dedicated cluster
• Access an HCP Consul Dedicated cluster
• Delete an HCP Consul Dedicated cluster
• Deploy Consul clients
• Deploy Consul dataplanes