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Deploy Teleport Agents with Terraform

An agent is a Teleport instance configured to run one or more Teleport services in order to proxy infrastructure resources. For a brief architectural overview of how agents run in a Teleport cluster, read the Introduction to Teleport Agents.

This guide shows you how to deploy a pool of Teleport agents running on virtual machines by declaring it as code using Terraform.

There are several methods you can use to join a Teleport agent to your cluster, which we discuss in the Joining Services to your Cluster guide. In this guide, we will use the join token method, where the operator stores a secure token on the Auth Service, and an agent presents the token in order to join a cluster.

No matter which join method you use, it will involve the following Terraform resources:

  • Compute instances to run Teleport services
  • A join token for each compute instance in the agent pool

A Teleport agent pool

Prerequisites​

  • A running Teleport cluster version 15.4.22 or above. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.

  • The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool.

    On Teleport Enterprise, you must use the Enterprise version of tctl, which you can download from your Teleport account workspace. Otherwise, visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh for Teleport Community Edition.

tip

We recommend following this guide on a fresh Teleport demo cluster so you can see how an agent pool works. After you are familiar with the setup, apply the lessons from this guide to protect your infrastructure. You can get started with a demo cluster using:

  • An AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure account with permissions to create virtual machine instances.

  • Cloud infrastructure that enables virtual machine instances to connect to the Teleport Proxy Service. For example:

    • An AWS subnet with a public NAT gateway or NAT instance.
    • Google Cloud NAT
    • Azure NAT Gateway

    In minimum-security demo clusters, you can also configure the VM instances you deploy to have public IP addresses.

  • Terraform v1.0.0 or higher.

  • An identity file for the Teleport Terraform provider. Make sure you are familiar with how to set up the Teleport Terraform provider before following this guide.

  • To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login, then verify that you can run tctl commands using your current credentials. tctl is supported on macOS and Linux machines.

    For example:

    $ tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=email@example.com
    $ tctl status
    # Cluster  teleport.example.com
    # Version  15.4.22
    # CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678

    If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequent tctl commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.

Step 1/3. Import the Terraform module​

  1. Navigate to the directory where you plan to organize files for your root Terraform module.

  2. Move the identity file for the Teleport Terraform provider into your project directory so the Terraform provider can access it. Name the file terraform-identity.

    warning

    If you don't have an identity file available, make sure you have followed the prerequisites for this guide.

  3. Fetch the Teleport code repository and copy the example Terraform configuration for this project into your current working directory. Copy the appropriate child module for your cloud provider into a subdirectory called cloud and HCL configurations for Teleport resources into a subdirectory called teleport:

    $ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/gravitational/teleport teleport-clone
    $ cp -R teleport-clone/examples/agent-pool-terraform/teleport teleport
    $ cp -R teleport-clone/examples/agent-pool-terraform/aws cloud
    $ rm -rf teleport-clone

  4. Create a file called main.tf with the following content, which imports the agent-pool-terraform module for your cloud provider:

module "teleport" {
  source                = "./teleport"
  agent_count           = 2
  agent_roles           = ["Node"]
  proxy_service_address = "teleport.example.com:443"
  teleport_edition      = "oss"
  teleport_version      = "15.4.22"
}

module "agents" {
  region           = ""
  source           = "./cloud"
  subnet_id        = ""
  userdata_scripts = module.teleport.userdata_scripts
}

Edit the module "teleport" block in main.tf as follows:

  1. Assign agent_count to 2 for high availability. As you scale your Teleport usage, you can increase this count to ease the load on each agent.

  2. Modify the elements of the agent_roles list.

    The Teleport Auth Service associates a join token with one or more roles, identifying the Teleport services that are allowed to use the token. Modify agent_roles to include the token roles that correspond to the Teleport services you plan to run on your agent nodes:

    Role valueService it enables
    AppTeleport Application Service
    DiscoveryTeleport Discovery Service
    DbTeleport Database Service
    KubeTeleport Kubernetes Service
    NodeTeleport SSH Service

    The elements of the agent_roles list also determine which Teleport services the agents deployed by the agent-pool-terraform module will run. For example, if the value of agent_roles is ["Node", "Db"], the configuration file enables the Teleport SSH Service and Teleport Database Service.

    If the value of the agent_roles input variable includes the Node role, the configuration also adds the role: agent-pool label to the Teleport SSH Service on each instance. This makes it easier to access hosts in the agent pool later. The script makes Teleport the only option for accessing agent instances by disabling OpenSSH on startup and deleting any authorized public keys.

  3. Assign proxy_service_address to the host and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service, e.g., mytenant.teleport.sh:443.

    tip

    Make sure to include the port.

  4. Make sure teleport_edition matches your Teleport edition. Assign this to oss, cloud, or enterprise. The default is oss.

  5. If needed, change the value of teleport_version to the version of Teleport you want to run on your agents. It must be either the same major version as your Teleport cluster or one major version behind.

Edit the module "agents" block in main.tf as follows:

  1. If you are deploying your instance in a minimum-security demo environment and do not have a NAT gateway, NAT instance, or other method for connecting your instances to the Teleport Proxy Service, modify the module block to associate a public IP address with each agent instance:

    insecure_direct_access=true

  2. Assign the remaining input variables depending on your cloud provider:

  1. Assign region to the AWS region where you plan to deploy Teleport agents, such as us-east-1.
  2. For subnet_id, include the ID of the subnet where you will deploy Teleport agents.

Step 2/3. Add provider configurations​

In this step, you will configure the agent-pool-terraform module for your Teleport cluster and cloud provider.

In your project directory, create a file called providers.tf with the following content:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 4.0"
    }

    teleport = {
      source  = "terraform.releases.teleport.dev/gravitational/teleport"
      version = "15.4.22"
    }
  }
}

provider "aws" {
  region = AWS_REGION
}

provider "teleport" {
  # Update addr to point to your Teleport Cloud tenant URL's host:port
  addr               = PROXY_SERVICE_ADDRESS
  identity_file_path = "terraform-identity"
}

Replace the following placeholders:

PlaceholderValue
AWS_REGIONThe AWS region where you will deploy agents, e.g., us-east-2
PROXY_SERVICE_ADDRESSThe host and port of the Teleport Proxy Service, e.g., example.teleport.sh:443

Step 3/3. Verify the deployment​

Make sure your cloud provider credentials are available to Terraform using the standard approach for your organization.

Apply the Terraform configuration:

$ terraform init
$ terraform apply

Once the apply command completes, run the following command to verify that your agents have deployed successfully. This command, which assumes that the agents have the Node role, lists all Teleport SSH Service instances with the role=agent-pool label:

$ tsh ls role=agent-pool
Node Name                  Address    Labels
-------------------------- ---------- ---------------
ip-10-1-1-187.ec2.internal ⟵ Tunnel   role=agent-pool
ip-10-1-1-24.ec2.internal  ⟵ Tunnel   role=agent-pool

Next step: Enroll infrastructure resources​

In this section, we describe the two ways to configure your agent pool to protect infrastructure resources with Teleport.

Define dynamic resources in Terraform​

You can declare Terraform resources that enroll your infrastructure with Teleport. The Teleport Terraform provider currently supports the following:

Infrastructure ResourceTerraform Resource
Applicationteleport_app
Databaseteleport_database

To declare a dynamic resource with Terraform, add a configuration block similar to the ones below to a *.tf file in your agent-pool-terraform project directory.

The Teleport Terraform provider creates these on the Auth Service backend, and the relevant Teleport services query them in order to proxy user traffic. For a full list of supported resources and fields, see the Terraform provider reference.

resource "teleport_app" "example" {
  metadata = {
    name        = "example"
    description = "Test app"
    labels = {
      // Teleport adds this label by default, so add it here to
      // ensure a consistent state.
      "teleport.dev/origin" = "dynamic"
    }
  }

  spec = {
    uri = "localhost:3000"
  }
}

Configure Teleport services in the agent pool​

Each Teleport service reads its local configuration file (/etc/teleport.yaml by default) to determine which infrastructure resources to proxy. You can edit this configuration file to enroll resources with Teleport.

In the setup we explored in this guide, you can edit the user data script for each instance to add configuration settings to, for example, the database_service or kubernetes_service sections.

To see how to configure each service, read its section of the documentation:

Further reading: How the module works​

In this section, we explain the resources configured in the agent-pool-terraform module.

Join token​

The agent-pool-terraform module deploys one virtual machine instance for each Teleport agent. Each agent joins the cluster using a token. We create each token using the teleport_provision_token Terraform resource, specifying the token's value with a random_string resource:

(!examples/agent-pool-terraform/teleport/token.tf!)

When we apply the teleport_provision_token resources, the Teleport Terraform provider creates them on the Teleport Auth Service backend.

User data script​

Each Teleport agent deployed by the agent-pool-terraform module loads a user data script that creates a Teleport configuration file for the agent. The services enabled by the configuration file depend on the value of the agent_roles input variable:

(!examples/agent-pool-terraform/teleport/userdata!)

Virtual machine instances​

Each cloud-specific child module of agent-pool-terraform declares resources to deploy a virtual machine instance on your cloud provider:

ec2-instance.tf declares a data source for an Amazon Linux 2023 machine image and uses it to launch EC2 instances that run Teleport agents with the teleport_provision_token resource:

(!examples/agent-pool-terraform/aws/ec2-instance.tf!)