Stretching the Service Mesh Beyond the Clouds

We hear a lot about using service mesh with Kubernetes and public clouds, but what about outside the clouds? In this talk, you’ll learn creative ways to apply a service mesh across different platforms and environments to automate canary deployments, facilitate cloud migrations, and more. By combining HashiCorp Consul’s service mesh and Terraform’s infrastructure as code, you can build a more seamless operational experience across multiple environments.

Transcript

1. June 2021 | stackconf Stretching the Service Mesh Beyond the Clouds
2. We moved from datacenter to Amazon Web Services.
3. One team wants to use Microsoft Azure.
4. These applications should be refactored to use Kubernetes.
5. This application cannot run in a container.
6. Datacenter + AWS + Azure + Kubernetes + Virtual Machines = ???
7. Developer Advocate at HashiCorp she/her @joatmon08 joatmon08.github.io Rosemary Wang
8. 01 Problem Multiple platforms & environments
9. DATACENTER CLOUD LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.CLOUD LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION.DATACENTER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.MY-COMPANY.NET SOME INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER HERE SOME AUTOMATION HERE
10. Service Mesh An infrastructure layer to manage and abstract service-to-service communication
11. DATACENTER CONSUL SERVER (DATACENTER) PROXY PROXY UI MY-APPLICATION CLOUD PROXY MY-APPLICATION CONSUL SERVER (CLOUD)
12. More Service Mesh, More Problems? Some added complexity ▪ Yet another agent ▪ More to debug ▪ More to operate ▪ Point of failure
13. No Service Mesh, More Problems Operational responsibility for multiple clouds ▪ Minimal automation ▪ Multiple sources of truth ▪ Multiple sources of control ▪ Multiple metrics approaches
14. 02 Solutions Service Mesh Deployment Topologies
15. DATACENTER CLOUD LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.CLOUD LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION.DATACENTER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.MY-COMPANY.NET NETWORK AUTOMATION TO SYNCHRONIZE SERVICE MESH FOR CLOUD DIRECT CONNECT
16. Benefits Network Automation + Service Mesh ▪ In service mesh: – Control retries and error handling to non-service mesh – Progressive delivery techniques (canary, A/B testing, feature flagging) ▪ In non-service mesh: – Automated control – No change to existing applications
17. DATACENTER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.CLOUD APPLICATION LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION.DATACENTER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.MY-COMPANY.NET DIRECT CONNECT CLOUD (CONSUL SERVICE MESH) 💡 Private network connectivity ❗Separate network automation ❗Multiple metrics CONSUL INGRESS GATEWAY CONSUL TERRAFORM SYNC
18. Consul Terraform Sync (CTS) DAEMON GETS EVENT SERVICE CHANGED TERRAFORM CONFIGURATION REFERENCES MODULE USE TEMPLATE TO CREATE TERRAFORM CONFIGURATION RUNS TERRAFORM TERRAFORM MODULE DOWNLOAD MODULE AND APPLY CHANGES
19. Network Automation Demo github.com/joatmon08/cloud-migration Note: • Deployed in AWS • Datacenter uses virtual machines in us-east-2 • Cloud uses Kubernetes in us-west-2 • Network automation configures an application load balancer
20. DATACENTER (SERVICE MESH) LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.CLOUD LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION.DATACENTER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.MY-COMPANY.NET FEDERATION BETWEEN SERVICE MESHES CLOUD (SERVICE MESH)
21. Benefits Federated Service Mesh ▪ One place to control retries and error handling ▪ Aggregated & standardized metrics ▪ Progressive delivery across all environments & frameworks – Fully automated canary deployment – A/B testing
22. DATACENTER (CONSUL SERVICE MESH, SECONDARY) LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.CLOUD LOAD BALANCER MY-APPLICATION.DATACENTER MY-APPLICATION-0 MY-APPLICATION-1 MY-APPLICATION-2 MY-APPLICATION.MY-COMPANY.NET CONSUL MESH GATEWAY CONSUL MESH GATEWAY CLOUD (CONSUL SERVICE MESH, PRIMARY) 💡 Private/public network connectivity ❗Must retrofit service mesh
23. CONSUL SERVER (DATACENTER) PROXY PROXY UI MY-APPLICATION PROXY MY-APPLICATION CONSUL SERVER (CLOUD) PROMETHEUS USE METRICS FOR CANARY ANALYSIS CONFIGURE CONSUL SERVICE SPLITTER - 90% CONFIGURE CONSUL SERVICE SPLITTER - 10% COLLECT METRICS COLLECT METRICS
24. Federation Demo github.com/joatmon08/cloud-migration/tree/federated Note: • Deployed in AWS • Datacenter uses virtual machines in us-east-2 • Cloud uses Kubernetes in us-west-2 • Federation sets cloud as primary
25. Summary Choose your topology Network Infrastructure Automation Use what already exists. Adds layer of automation. Service Mesh Federation Abstract environment, application framework, and runtime. Adds layer of control.
26. References ▪ github.com/joatmon08/cloud-migration(/tree/federated) ▪ hashi.co/spinnaker-consul ▪ learn.hashicorp.com ▪ learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/consul-terraform-sync-intro ▪ consul.io/docs/connect Find these slides at joatmon08.github.io