Consul ECS 0.7.x

Release highlights

• Consul Dataplane: Consul on ECS 0.7.x adopts the Dataplane architecture to simplify connecting your ECS workloads to Consul. Refer to the documentation to learn more about the updated ECS components and how to deploy Consul to ECS using the Terraform module.

• New control-plane command: The new, unified control-plane command combines the capabilities for the deprecated mesh-init and health-sync commands. The control-plane command starts a long running process with the following responsibilities:

  • Automatically (re)discover and (re)connect to Consul servers using connection manager.
  • Make an ACL Login request to obtain an ACL token when using the Consul AWS IAM auth method.
  • Register the service and sidecar proxy with the central catalog on the Consul servers.
  • Write the configuration for Consul Dataplane to a file on a shared volume.
  • Sync ECS health check statuses for the ECS task into the central catalog on the Consul servers on a periodic basis.
  • Gracefully shutdown when an ECS task is stopped. Upon receiving a SIGTERM, mark synced health checks critical and wait for Consul Dataplane to stop. Then remove health checks, services, and perform an ACL Logout if necessary.

• New controller command: The new controller command replaces the acl-controller command with the following changes:

  • Remove all CLI flags. Configuration is read from the ECS_CONFIG_JSON environment variable.
  • Automatically (re)discover and (re)connect to Consul servers, similar to the control-plane command.
  • Because Consul client agents are no longer used, the controller no longer configures the "client" auth method, policy, role, and binding rule which previously enabled Consul client agents to login.
  • Register the ECS cluster as a synthetic node in the central catalog on the Consul servers. The synthetic node is used to register services running in the ECS cluster.
  • Ensure leftover tokens and services are removed for ECS tasks that have stopped.

• Locality aware routing (Enterprise): Consul on ECS 0.7.x supports locality-aware routing. In your ECS task meta JSON, set the AWS_REGION container environment variable and AvailabilityZone attributes to set the locality parameters in Consul service and proxy registrations. Consul uses these parameters to perform locality aware routing in Consul Enterprise installations.

Breaking changes

• The new Dataplane architecture comes with the following breaking changes to configuring Consul on ECS. Refer to the Upgrade to Consul dataplane architecture documentation for a step-by-step upgrade guide.
  • Consul client agents are no longer used.
  • Consul Dataplane must be run in place of Envoy in each ECS task. Consul Dataplane manages the Envoy process and proxies xDS requests from Envoy to Consul servers.
  • The consul-ecs binary now communicates with Consul servers using HTTP(S) and GRPC.
  • Services are registered directly with the central catalog on the Consul servers. Services in the same ECS cluster are registered to the same Consul node name.
• Replaced the mesh-init and health-sync commands with a unified control-plane.
• Replaced the acl-controller command with controller.
• Add the go-discover binary to the Consul ECS image to better support cloud auto-join.
• Changes to ECS_CONFIG_JSON schema.

  • Remove the consulHTTPAddr and consulCACertFile fields.

  • Add the consulLogin.datacenter field.

  • Add the controller field to support configuring the new controller command.

  • Add the consulServers field to specify the Consul server location and protocol-specific settings.

  • The consulServers.hosts field is required. This specifies the Consul server location as an IP address, DNS name, or exec= string specifying a command that returns a list of IP addresses. To use cloud auto-join, use an exec= string to run the discover CLI. For example, the following string invokes the discover CLI with a cloud auto-join string:

    exec=discover -q addrs provider=aws region=us-west-2 tag_key=consul-server tag_value=true
    

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    By default, Consul ECS and Consul Dataplane images include the discover CLI.

  • Add the proxy.healthCheckPort field which can be hit to determine Envoy's readiness.

  • Add the proxy.upstreams.destinationPeer field to enable the proxy to hit upstreams present in peer Consul clusters.

  • Add the meshGateway.healthCheckPort field which can be hit to determine Envoy's readiness.

  • Add the proxy.localServiceAddress field to configure Envoy to use a different address for the local service.

  • Remove the service.checks field. Consul agent health checks are no longer supported because Consul client agents are not used. Instead, set the healthSyncContainers field to have consul-ecs sync ECS health checks into Consul.

Supported software versions

• Consul: 1.17.x

Changelogs

The changelogs for this major release version and any maintenance versions are listed below.

• 0.7.0