Install Tectonic on AWS with Terraform

Use this guide to manually install a Tectonic cluster on an AWS account. To install Tectonic on AWS with a graphical installer instead, refer to the AWS graphical installer documentation.

Generally, the AWS platform templates adhere to the standards defined by the project conventions and generic platform requirements. This document aims to document the implementation details specific to the AWS platform.

Prerequsities

• CoreOS Account: Register for a CoreOS Account, which provides free access for up to 10 nodes on Tectonic. You must provide the account's License and Pull Secret (available from the account Overview page) during installation.
• Terraform: Tectonic Installer includes and requires a specific version of Terraform. This is included in the Tectonic Installer tarball. See the Tectonic Installer release notes for information about which Terraform versions are compatible.
• DNS: Ensure that the DNS zone is already created and available in Route 53 for the account. For example if the tectonic_base_domain is set to kube.example.com a Route 53 zone must exist for this domain and the AWS nameservers must be configured for the domain.

Getting Started

Create a CoreOS account

Tectonic Installer requires the License and Pull Secret provided with a CoreOS account. To obtain this information and up to 10 free nodes, create a CoreOS account.

1. Go to https://account.coreos.com/login, and click Sign Up.

2. Check your inbox for a confirmation email. Click through to accept the terms of the license, activate your account, and be redirected to the Account Overview page.

3. Click "Free for use up to 10 nodes" under Tectonic. Enter your contact information, and click Get License for 10 nodes.

Once the update has processed, the Overview window will refresh to include links to download the License and Pull Secret.

Download and extract Tectonic Installer

Open a new terminal and run the following command to download Tectonic Installer.

$ curl -O https://releases.tectonic.com/releases/tectonic_1.7.5-tectonic.1.tar.gz # download

Verify the release has been signed by the CoreOS App Signing Key.

$ gpg2 --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 18AD5014C99EF7E3BA5F6CE950BDD3E0FC8A365E
$ gpg2 --verify tectonic_1.7.5-tectonic.1.tar.gz.sig tectonic_1.7.5-tectonic.1.tar.gz
# gpg2: Good signature from "CoreOS Application Signing Key <security@coreos.com>"

Extract the tarball and navigate to the tectonic directory.

$ tar xzvf tectonic_1.7.5-tectonic.1.tar.gz
$ cd tectonic

Initialize and configure Terraform

Add the terraform binary to our PATH. The platform should be darwin or linux.

$ export PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)/tectonic-installer/darwin # Put the `terraform` binary on the PATH

Download the Tectonic Terraform modules.

$ terraform init platforms/aws
Downloading modules...
Get: modules/aws/vpc
Get: modules/aws/etcd
Get: modules/aws/ignition
Get: modules/aws/master-asg
Get: modules/aws/ignition
Get: modules/aws/worker-asg
Get: modules/bootkube
Get: modules/tectonic
Get: modules/net/flannel-vxlan
Get: modules/net/calico-network-policy

Initializing provider plugins...
   Checking for available provider plugins on https://releases.hashicorp.com...

Terraform will download any available plugins, and report when initialization is complete.

Configure your AWS credentials. See the AWS docs for details.

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=

Set your desired region:

$ export AWS_REGION=

Next, specify the cluster configuration.

Customize the deployment

Customizations to the base installation live in examples/terraform.tfvars.aws. Export a variable that will be your cluster identifier:

$ export CLUSTER=my-cluster

Create a build directory to hold your customizations and copy the example file into it:

$ mkdir -p build/${CLUSTER}
$ cp examples/terraform.tfvars.aws build/${CLUSTER}/terraform.tfvars

Edit the parameters with your AWS details, domain name, license, etc. View all of the AWS specific options and the common Tectonic variables.

Deploy the cluster

Test out the plan before deploying everything:

$ terraform plan -var-file=build/${CLUSTER}/terraform.tfvars platforms/aws

Next, deploy the cluster:

$ terraform apply -var-file=build/${CLUSTER}/terraform.tfvars platforms/aws

This will run for a little bit. When complete, your Tectonic cluster will be ready.

Access the cluster

The Tectonic Console will be up and running after the containers have downloaded. Access it at the DNS name https://<tectonic_cluster_name>.<tectonic_base_domain>, configured in the terraform.tfvars variables file.

Inside of the /generated folder you should find any credentials, including the CA if generated, and a kubeconfig. Use these credentials to control the cluster with kubectl:

$ export KUBECONFIG=generated/auth/kubeconfig
$ kubectl cluster-info

Work with the cluster

For more information on working with installed clusters, see Scaling Tectonic AWS clusters, and Uninstalling Tectonic.

Known issues and workarounds

See the troubleshooting document for workarounds for bugs that are being tracked.