2020-05-11 21:15:59 +00:00
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---
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layout: docs
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page_title: Multi-Cluster Federation Overview
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description: >-
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Installing on multiple Kubernetes clusters.
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---
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# Multi-Cluster Federation Overview
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In Consul, federation is the act of joining two or more Consul datacenters.
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When datacenters are joined, Consul servers in each datacenter can communicate
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with one another. This enables the following features:
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- Services on all clusters can make calls to each other through Consul Service Mesh.
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- [Intentions](/docs/connect/intentions) can be used to enforce rules about which services can communicate across all clusters.
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2022-01-10 23:36:16 +00:00
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- [L7 Routing Rules](/docs/connect/l7-traffic) can enable multi-cluster failover
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2020-05-11 21:15:59 +00:00
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and traffic splitting.
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- The Consul UI has a drop-down menu that lets you navigate between datacenters.
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## Traditional WAN Federation vs. WAN Federation Via Mesh Gateways
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Consul provides two mechanisms for WAN (Wide Area Network) federation:
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1. Traditional WAN Federation
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1. WAN Federation Via Mesh Gateways (newly available in Consul 1.8.0)
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### Traditional WAN Federation
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With traditional WAN federation, all Consul servers must be exposed on the wide area
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network. In the Kubernetes context this is often difficult to set up. It would require that
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each Consul server pod is running on a Kubernetes node with an IP address that is routable from
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all other Kubernetes clusters. Often Kubernetes clusters are deployed into private
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subnets that other clusters cannot route to without additional network devices and configuration.
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The Kubernetes solution to the problem of exposing pods is load balancer services but these can't be used
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with traditional WAN federation because it requires proxying both UDP and TCP and Kubernetes load balancers only proxy TCP.
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In addition, each Consul server would need its own load balancer because each
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server needs a unique address. This would increase cost and complexity.
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### WAN Federation Via Mesh Gateways
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To solve the problems that occurred with traditional WAN federation,
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Consul 1.8.0 now supports WAN federation **via mesh gateways**. This mechanism
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only requires that mesh gateways are exposed with routable addresses, not Consul servers. We can front
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the mesh gateway pods with a single Kubernetes service and all traffic flows between
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datacenters through the mesh gateways.
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## Network Requirements
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Clusters/datacenters can be federated even if they have overlapping pod IP spaces or if they're
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on different cloud providers or platforms. Kubernetes clusters can even be
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federated with Consul datacenters running on virtual machines (and vice versa).
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Because the communication between clusters is end-to-end encrypted, mesh gateways
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can even be exposed on the public internet.
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The only requirement is that the mesh gateways for each cluster can route to
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one another. For example, if using a load balancer service in front of each cluster's
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mesh gateway, the load balancer IP must be routable from the other mesh gateway pods.
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If using a public load balancer, this is guaranteed. If using a private load balancer
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then you'll need to make sure that its IP is routable from your other clusters.
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2022-05-11 17:11:45 +00:00
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In addition, if ACLs are enabled, primary clusters must be able to make requests to the Kubernetes API URL of
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secondary clusters.
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2020-05-11 21:15:59 +00:00
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## Next Steps
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Now that you have an overview of federation, proceed to either the
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[Federation Between Kubernetes Clusters](/docs/k8s/installation/multi-cluster/kubernetes)
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or [Federation Between VMs and Kubernetes](/docs/k8s/installation/multi-cluster/vms-and-kubernetes)
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pages depending on your use case.
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