122 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
122 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: "intro"
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page_title: "Consul Cluster"
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sidebar_current: "gettingstarted-join"
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---
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# Consul Cluster
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By this point, we've started our first agent and registered and queried
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one or more services on that agent. This showed how easy it is to use
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Consul, but didn't show how this could be extended to a scalable production
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service discovery infrastructure. On this page, we'll create our first
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real cluster with multiple members.
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When starting a Consul agent, it begins without knowledge of any other node, and is
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an isolated cluster of one. To learn about other cluster members, the agent must
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_join_ an existing cluster. To join an existing cluster, only needs to know
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about a _single_ existing member. After it joins, the agent will gossip with this
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member and quickly discover the other members in the cluster. A Consul
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agent can join any other agent, it doesn't have to be an agent in server mode.
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## Starting the Agents
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To simulate a more realistic cluster, we are using a two node cluster in
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Vagrant. The Vagrantfile can be found in the demo section of the repo
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[here](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/tree/master/demo/vagrant-cluster).
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We start the first agent on our first node and also specify a node name.
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The node name must be unique and is how a machine is uniquely identified.
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By default it is the hostname of the machine, but we'll manually override it.
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We are also providing a bind address. This is the address that Consul listens on,
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and it *must* be accessible by all other nodes in the cluster. The first node
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will act as our server in this cluster. We're still not making a cluster
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of servers.
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```
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$ consul agent -server -bootstrap -data-dir /tmp/consul \
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-node=agent-one -bind=172.20.20.10
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...
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```
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Then, in another terminal, start the second agent on the new node.
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This time, we set the bind address to match the IP of the second node
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as specified in the Vagrantfile. In production, you will generally want
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to provide a bind address or interface as well.
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```
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$ consul agent -data-dir /tmp/consul -node=agent-two -bind=172.20.20.11
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...
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```
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At this point, you have two Consul agents running, one server and one client.
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The two Consul agents still don't know anything about each other, and are each part of their own
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clusters (of one member). You can verify this by running `consul members`
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against each agent and noting that only one member is a part of each.
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## Joining a Cluster
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Now, let's tell the first agent to join the second agent by running
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the following command in a new terminal:
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```
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$ consul join 172.20.20.11
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Successfully joined cluster by contacting 1 nodes.
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```
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You should see some log output in each of the agent logs. If you read
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carefully, you'll see that they received join information. If you
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run `consul members` against each agent, you'll see that both agents now
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know about each other:
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```
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$ consul members
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agent-one 172.20.20.10:8301 alive role=consul,dc=dc1,vsn=1,vsn_min=1,vsn_max=1,port=8300,bootstrap=1
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agent-two 172.20.20.11:8301 alive role=node,dc=dc1,vsn=1,vsn_min=1,vsn_max=1
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```
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<div class="alert alert-block alert-info">
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<p><strong>Remember:</strong> To join a cluster, a Consul agent needs to only
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learn about <em>one existing member</em>. After joining the cluster, the
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agents gossip with each other to propagate full membership information.
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</p>
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</div>
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In addition to using `consul join` you can use the `-join` flag on
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`consul agent` to join a cluster as part of starting up the agent.
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## Querying Nodes
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Just like querying services, Consul has an API for querying the
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nodes themselves. You can do this via the DNS or HTTP API.
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For the DNS API, the structure of the names is `NAME.node.consul` or
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`NAME.DATACENTER.node.consul`. If the datacenter is omitted, Consul
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will only search the local datacenter.
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From "agent-one", query "agent-two":
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```
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$ dig @127.0.0.1 -p 8600 agent-two.node.consul
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...
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;; QUESTION SECTION:
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;agent-two.node.consul. IN A
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;; ANSWER SECTION:
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agent-two.node.consul. 0 IN A 172.20.20.11
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```
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The ability to look up nodes in addition to services is incredibly
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useful for system administration tasks. For example, knowing the address
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of the node to SSH into is as easy as making it part of the Consul cluster
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and querying it.
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## Leaving a Cluster
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To leave the cluster, you can either gracefully quit an agent (using
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`Ctrl-C`) or force kill one of the agents. Gracefully leaving allows
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the node to transition into the _left_ state, otherwise other nodes
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will detect it as having _failed_. The difference is covered
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in more detail [here](/intro/getting-started/agent.html#toc_3).
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