HashiCorp Certified - Consul Associate Course

1. Course Introduction

This video will introduce you to the overall course, the training format, and discuss the objectives that you can expect to see when taking the official certification exam.

1. Objective 1 - Section Overview

This section will introduce you to Objective 1 and the topics that we will cover.

2. Introduction to HashiCorp Consul

Let's get started and learn more about HashiCorp Consul and the use cases that it aims to provide for organizations.

3. Service Discovery

In this video, you will learn the details of service discovery and how Consul provides this function to enable simple and efficient communication between clients and services, or between application services.

4. Service Mesh

Learn more about Consul's service mesh feature, which provides service segmentation functionality.

5. Network Automation

You will learn more about the network automation feature in Consul and how it's used to direct traffic to registered services.

6. Service Configuration

Learn more about how Consul provides a K/V store to be used for service configuration to store variable and parameters.

7. Basic Consul Architecture

Learn the Consul basics in this introductory video.

8. Consensus Protocol (Raft)

Learn more about the consensus protocol, which is a key protocol that Consul uses for Consul servers' nodes.

9. Gossip Protocol (Serf)

In this video, you can learn more about the gossip protocol that Consul uses, which is based on Serf.

10. Network Traffic and Ports

This video will introduce you to the networking and ports required to run Consul in your environment.

11. Consul High Availability

In this video, you will learn more about how to configure Consul for high availability to ensure that the Consul service is always available.

12. Scaling for Performance

Performance can be scaled using read-only nodes. Check it out here.

13. Voting Versus Non-Voting Servers

To vote or not to vote-that is the question for our Consul server nodes in this video.

14. Redundancy Zones

This cool feature of Consul allows you to provide Consul across fault zones to give you even higher service availability.

15. Consul Autopilot

Learn how autopilot can help ease the burden on day-to-day Consul operations.

16. Objective 1 - Section Recap

Let's quickly talk about what we discussed in this first section.

1. Objective 2 - Section Overview

Welcome to Objective 2, deploying a single datacenter.

2. Start the Consul Process

In this video, you will understand how to download Consul and get the Consul agent up and running.

3. Lab Session - Starting the Consul Process - Using Dev Mode

In this lab, we will start the Consul process using a configuration file. We will also start Consul in dev mode and see what that looks like.

4. Manage the Consul Process

In this video, you will understand how to manage the Consul process after it's up and running.

5. Consul Agent Configuration

The Consul agent requires either flags or a configuration file to run as expected. This video will go over both with a larger focus on the configuration file as it's the most popular.

6. Lab Session - Creating a Consul Agent Configuration

This lab will walk you through a configuration file to ensure they understand how to create one for themselves. It will also provide the base configuration that we will build on throughout the course.

7. Configure Networking and Ports

In this video, you will learn how to configure the IP/Interface and ports that Consul will use when it's running.

8. Adding/Removing Consul Agents to the Cluster

Now that the Consul agent is running, how do we join server nodes to create a cluster, and how do we join clients to the cluster.

9. Lab Session - Adding and Removing Consul Agents

Now that we have our Consul agents up and running, let's join the servers together to create the cluster that we will use throughout the course labs.

10. Objective 2 - Section Recap

Let's recap this section and review some of the things that we learned.

1. Objective 3 - Section Overview

This video introduces you to the section.

2. Registering a Consul Service

In this video, we will talk about what a service is and how to register one in the Consul service catalog.

3. Creating a Service Definition

This video will show you how to create a service definition file and all of the components that might be needed so you can register a service.

4. Lab Session - Service Definition and Registration

In the first lab of this objective, we will walk through a simple service definition and register some services with Consul.

5. Configuring Service Health Checks

This video will show you what a health check is and how to create one.

6. Lab Session - Working with Health Checks

Now that we have a service registered, let's update the service configuration to now include a health check that ensures our application is up and running.

7. Check Service Status from the Catalog

Now that we have a health check registered for our service, how do we check on the status? That's what we will talk about during this video.

8. Lab Session - Check Service Status from the Catalog

We can retrieve the hosts for a specific service using any Consul interface, including the UI, the CLI, and the API. That's what we will do in this lab session.

9. Introduction to Prepared Queries

Traditional DNS queries for a Consul service are cool, but prepared queries are where it's at. Check out this video and find out why.

10. Lab Session - Prepared Queries

In this lab, we will create our first prepared query and retrieve the hosts that match the particular tags we want for a specific application version.

11. Objective 3 - Section Recap

That was a long lesson; let's check out all the cool stuff we talked about.

1. Objective 4 - Section Overview

This video will provide a brief introduction to the Consul key/value section.

2. Introduction to Consul K/V Store

In this video, we will talk about general information about the Consul key/value store and what it can be used for within your organization.

3. Interacting with Consul K/V

Now that we have data in the Consul K/V, let's look at how we can interact with it using the API, UI, and CLI.

4. Lab Session - Working with the Consul K/V

In this lab, you will learn how to interact with the Consul K/V store by writing and reading data for your application.

5. Using Consul Watch to Monitor Changes

You can expect to learn that Consul Watch is a built-in feature that we can use to monitor updates or changes to the K/V.

6. Using envconsul

In this video, you will learn more about what envconsul does and how you can use it for application integration with Consul.

7. Lab Session - Using Envconsul to Monitor Changes to Consul K/V

This lab will walk you through setting up envconsul to monitor and retrieve data from the Consul K/V store and automatically set them as environment variables.

8. Using consul-template

You will learn more about consul template and how it can be used for application integration.

9. Lab Session - Using Consul-Template to Monitor Changes to Consul K/V

This lab will walk you through setting up Consul-Template to monitor and retrieve data from the Consul K/V store and create a configuration file that includes data from Consul.

10. Objective 4 - Section Recap

Let's recap some of our discussions during this section.

1. Objective 5 - Section Overview

This video is an introduction to how we can use Consul snapshots to back-up and restore our Consul cluster.

2. Introduction to Consul Snapshots

What are snapshots and why do we need them? You will learn this and more in this introduction to snapshots video.

3. Using Consul Snapshots

In this video, you will learn how to take snapshots and restore using Consul snapshots.

4. Lab Session - Consul Snapshots

Let's practice taking some snapshots of our cluster and inspecting the snapshot files.

5. Consul Snapshot Agent (Enterprise)

This video will discuss what the Consul Snapshot Agent is and how we can use it to automate the creation of consistent snapshots of our Consul cluster. Keep in mind that this is a Consul Enterprise feature.

6. Lab Session - Using the Consul Snapshot Agent (Enterprise)

In this lab session, we will walk through the process of setting up the Consul Snapshot Agent on our cluster to take automatic snapshots of our cluster and store them in Amazon S3.

7. Objective 5 - Section Recap

Let's recap some of the topics that we discussed in this section.

1. Objective 6 - Section Overview

Welcome to Consul Service Mesh, where you will learn what service mesh is in greater detail.

2. Introduction to Consul Service Mesh

Consul Service Mesh has lots of moving parts, and you can expect to go much deeper into each of these and see how all the components work together to provide a holistic solution.

3. Registering a Service Proxy

Now that we know the components of service mesh, how do we register a service proxy for our Consul services?

4. Introduction to Consul Service Mesh Intentions

We will discuss how intentions can be used to permit or deny communication between our services.

5. Managing Consul Service Mesh Intentions

Let's see how to use all three Consul interfaces to create intentions.

6. Lab Session - Service Mesh

Let's see many awesome features of Consul Service Mesh.

7. Objective 6 - Section Recap

Let's recap what we learned in this section.

1. Objective 7 - Section Overview

The Consul security model helps operators secure the Consul datacenter and environment. This section will discuss the Consul security model and all of its components.

2. Consul Security/Threat Model

What is the Consul security/threat model and why should we care?

3. Certificates Required in Consul

Setting up the different components of the security model is key to deploying a secure Consul cluster. Learn more about the different TLS certificates that the Consul needs for a secure environment.

4. TLS Encryption Settings

Being that Consul is so flexible, even things like TLS encryption offer different ways to secure your cluster.

5. Objective 7 - Section Recap

What did we learn in this section? Let's recap and find out.

1. Objective 8 - Section Overview

The Consul ACL system is an important part of securing your Consul environment.

2. Introduction to the Consul ACL System

ACLs are one of the core components of the Consul security model. If you are running Consul in a production environment, you should absolutely have Consul ACLs enabled and configured correctly.

3. Lab Session - Enable and Configure the Consul ACL System

We are excited about Consul ACLs now, but it seems complicated. How do we get started? That's exactly what we will do in this lab session, so strap in and get ready.

4. Creating ACL Policies

Creating policies is simple with Consul and we will talk about how to do it in this video.

5. Lab Session - Creating ACL Policies

Let's jump into the lab and create some policies for our applications.

6. Creating and Managing ACL Tokens

Tokens are the core authentication method when using Consul ACLs, so you can expect to learn what they are and why they are important in this video.

7. Lab Session - Creating ACL Tokens

Now that we have a good policy created, let's create a token that can be used by our application for authentication.

8. Perform a UI task Using a Token

We have a token now, but how do we authenticate in the Consul UI? Let's dive into the Consul UI and find out in this video.

9. Lab Session - Using Tokens with the Consul UI

Let's check out how we authenticate using the Consul UI.

10. Perform a CLI Request Using a Token

In this video, you will learn how to authenticate with a Consul ACL token while using the Consul CLI.

11. Lab Session - Using Tokens with the Consul CLI

More live lab sessions? Yes, please. This quick session will teach you how to authenticate with a token using all four methods we discussed in the video.

12. Perform an API Request Using a Token

Now we are into the good stuff and talking about authenticating to Consul using the API.

13. Lab Session - Using Tokens with the Consul API

Let's perform an API request using our token for authentication.

14. Objective 8 - Section Recap

Let's recap what we learned in this section.

1. Objective 9 - Section Overview

Wow, you are almost there. It's the final objective. Let's talk about this objective and what we will cover.

2. Introduction to Gossip Encryption

You will learn about Gossip Encryption and how simple it is to use in this objective.

3. Configure Gossip Encryption

We know what Gossip Encryption is now, but how do we configure it? That's what we will walk through in this video.

4. Lab Session - Configure Gossip Encryption

We are running our cluster on AWS, which is an untrusted network as we don't own it. Time to dive into the lab and reconfigure our cluster to encrypt gossip communication so nobody can snoop on our conversations.

5. Manage the Lifecycle of Encryption Keys

Now that gossip encryption is up and running, you will learn how to manage the lifecycle of the existing or future gossip encryption keys.

6. Lab Session - Managing the Lifecycle of Encryption Keys

It's the last lab. Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. In this lab, you will learn how to create a new encryption key, install (or distribute) it throughout our cluster, and then instruct Consul to use our new key. We will then remove our old key.

7. Objective 9 - Section Recap

Let's recap the final objective and all the cool stuff we learned.