@ wrote... (4 years ago)

With the version v0.10.0 of Nomad a very important new feature has landed, network namespaces. Network namespaces allows integration with Consul Connect and that allows you to connect to remote services without having to know their address and port. Plus some security stuff but I care more about my services working than being securely broken.

You can read more official information here:

Consul Connect in Nomad are called sidecars. However… sidecars are an advanced feature and the docs and examples are very confusing. At least I found them very confusing. So here is a slightly modified version of the example job file with lots of comments that hopefully explains how to use this great new feature.

Some prep work needs to happen first though:

configure consul

ports {
  "grpc" = 8502            # enable grpc
}

connect {
  enabled = true
}

Don't forget (like somebody that totally wasn't me) to restart consul after this change.

CNI Plugins

Copied from guide:

# see https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins/releases/ for the latest
curl -L -o cni-plugins.tgz https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins/releases/download/v0.8.5/cni-plugins-linux-amd64-v0.8.5.tgz
mkdir -p /opt/cni/bin
tar -C /opt/cni/bin -xzf cni-plugins.tgz
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-arptables
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-ip6tables
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-iptables

countdash.nomad job file

job "countdash" {

   datacenters = ["test"]

   group "api" {

      network {
         mode = "bridge"
      }

      service {
         # create a service so that it's added to the consul catalog. This will
         # allow us to create envoy proxies that serve up this service
         name = "count-api"

         # counter-api is listening on this port on it's docker assigned ip address
         # however it is not exposed anywhere on the host (eg. netstat). The
         # created sidecar proxies to this port
         port = "9001"

         # creates a service in catalog called count-api-sidecar-proxy. In
         # the lookups below, it's "publicly" listening on 29393 via nat
         # but it's not visible on the host via netstat
         connect {
            # start an envoy proxy sidecar for allowing incoming connections via consul connect
            sidecar_service {}
         }

         # dig +short srv count-api.service.consul
         # 1 1 9001 nomad1.node.west.consul.
         # dig +short srv count-api-sidecar-proxy.service.consul
         # 1 1 29393 nomad1.node.west.consul.
      }

      task "web" {
         driver = "docker"

         config {
            image = "hashicorpnomad/counter-api:v1"
         }
      }
   }

   group "dashboard" {
      network {
         mode ="bridge"

         # by specifying a port here in the network stanza, we're making the port
         # publically available
         port "http" {
            # static = 9002
            # by not specifying a static port, a dynamic one is allocated
            # the dynamic port is forwarded to 9002 in the container via iptables nat
            to = 9002
         }
      }

      # we're defining this service to advertise the urlprefix tag so that fabio
      # can then act as a proxy for our count-dashboard service
      service {
         name = "count-dashboard"

         # use the dynamic port provided via the group.network.port stanza above
         port = "http"

         # tell fabio about this service so that it can proxy to the correct host and port
         tags = [
            "urlprefix-countdash.west.example.com/",
         ]

         check {
            type     = "http"
            path     = "/"
            interval = "30s"
            timeout  = "5s"
         }
      }

      # make multiple service stanzas if you have multiple services that you need to connect to
      # Note, because of a bug you must have nomad >= 0.10.2 to use multiple proxy.
      service {
         # in the online examples this was in the "count-dashboard" service but
         # that doesn't make sense to me as it's not a public service so shouldn't
         # be "exposed" on the port. Let's make a new service to "inject" the proxy
         # into the task so that the dashboard can communicate with the count-api
         # on port 8080. ie: count-dashboard connects to localhost:8080 and comes
         # out in count-api container and connects to port 9001
         connect {
            sidecar_service {
               proxy {
                  upstreams {
                     # create a proxy that listens on port 8080 in the dashboard container
                     local_bind_port = 8080
                     # the proxy then connects to service count-api
                     destination_name = "count-api"
                  }
               }
            }
         }
      }

      task "dashboard" {
         driver = "docker"

         env {
            COUNTING_SERVICE_URL = "http://${NOMAD_UPSTREAM_ADDR_count_api}"
         }

         config {
            image = "hashicorpnomad/counter-dashboard:v1"
         }
      } # task
   } # group
}

Hopefully that will help you and future me create jobs with sidecars.

Note: as of July 2020 there is a bug that prevents use of extra_hosts and consul connect: https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/7746

Category: tech, Tags: consul, nomad
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