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quorum-aws

This repo contains the tools we use to deploy test Quorum clusters to AWS.

  • We use Docker to build images for quorum, constellation, and this codebase (quorum-aws, which extends quorum-tools).
  • Docker images are pushed to AWS' ECS repositories.
  • We use Terraform to provision single-region (cross-availability-zone) and multi-region (cross-internet) Quorum clusters using these images.

With a little bit of time and an AWS account, you should be able to use this project to easily deploy a Quorum cluster to AWS.

Requirements

  • Installed software: Docker, Terraform, stack, jq, and awscli
  • awscli needs to be configured to talk to AWS (see the user guide or use aws configure help)
  • vim terraform/secrets/terraform.tfvars to reflect AWS credentials in ~/.aws/credentials

Building images

From the root of this project, you can execute the following two scripts in order to build Docker images for quorum, constellation, and quorum-aws. The latter will be built both locally and in docker (to be deployed to AWS.) We need to build and push these Docker images before we can run a cluster on AWS.

If we haven't already, we need to pull Quorum and Constellation down into the dependencies directory:

  • git submodule init && git submodule update

Then build the Docker images and push them to ECS repositories:

  • ./build && ./push

A note on how we are using Terraform

In order to manage terraformed infrastructure across different regions and clusters, instead of using the terraform binary directly, we use (symlinks to) a wrapper script (around the terraform binary) to automatically set variables and state output locations per environment. Take a look inside terraform/bin to see how this works:

> ls -al terraform/bin
total 64
drwxr-xr-x  11 bts  staff  374 Oct 11 15:13 .
drwxr-xr-x  13 bts  staff  442 Oct 11 15:35 ..
drwxr-xr-x   3 bts  staff  102 Oct 11 15:58 .bin
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff  793 Oct 11 14:39 .multi-start-cluster
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff  812 Oct 11 14:39 .multi-start-tunnels
lrwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff   16 Oct  2 11:42 demo -> .bin/env-wrapper
lrwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff   16 Oct  2 11:42 global -> .bin/env-wrapper
lrwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff   16 Oct  2 11:42 intl-ireland -> .bin/env-wrapper
lrwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff   16 Oct  2 11:42 intl-tokyo -> .bin/env-wrapper
lrwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff   16 Oct  2 11:42 intl-virginia -> .bin/env-wrapper
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bts  staff  235 Oct 11 15:13 multi-start

Here, demo is a symlink to the wrapper script that will invoke Terraform in a such a way that it knows we are concerned with the "demo" environment. Instead of using the terraform binary directly (e.g. terraform plan), we issue the same Terraform CLI commands to the wrapper script (e.g. bin/demo plan).

The pre-supplied binary wrappers have the following purposes:

  • global environment contains IAM infrastructure that is not particular to any one AWS region, and will be applyed only once.
  • demo is the default name of a single-region cluster that will be deployed to us-east-1.
  • intl-ireland, intl-tokyo, and intl-virginia contain the infrastructure respectively for 3 different regions in an international cluster. This infrastructure lives in separate files because Terraform is hard-coded to support at most one region per main.tf file.

If you want, you can simply make a new symlink (in terraform/bin) to terraform/bin/.bin/env-wrapper named whatever you like (eg. mycluster), and then you can use that script to launch a new cluster with that name.

One-time: initialize Terraform plugins (for Terraform 0.10+)

Because we're using the aws and null Terraform plugins, we need to initialize them:

  • terraform init

One-time: deploy some "global" IAM infrastructure

The following only needs to be done once to deploy some Identity and Access Management (IAM) infrastructure that we re-use across clusters:

  • cd terraform
  • bin/global apply

If at some point in the future you want to destroy this infrastructure, you can run bin/global destroy.

Deploying a single-region cluster

  • cd terraform

For a given Terraform environment, we can use the normal Terraform commands like plan, show, apply, destroy, and output to work with a single-region cluster:

  • bin/demo plan shows us what infrastructure will be provisioned if we decide to apply
  • bin/demo apply creates the infrastructure. In a single-region setting, this also automatically starts the Quorum cluster.
  • bin/demo show reports the current Terraform state for the environment
  • bin/demo output can print the value for an output variable listed in output.tf. e.g.: bin/demo output geth1. This can be handy to easily SSH into a node in the cluster: e.g. try ssh ubuntu@$(bin/demo output geth1) or ssh ubuntu@$(bin/demo output geth2).

Once SSH'd in to a node, we can use a few utility scripts that have been installed in the ubuntu user's homedir to interact with geth:

  • ./spam 10 will send in 10 transactions per second until ^C stops it
  • ./follow shows the end of the (tail -f/followed) geth log
  • ./attach attaches to the local geth process.
  • exit

At this point, if we like, we can destroy the cluster:

  • bin/demo destroy

Deploying a multi-region cluster

At the moment, this is slightly more involved than deployment for a single-region cluster. Symlinks (in terraform/bin) are currently set up for one multi-region called "intl" that spans three regions. Because ireland is set up in this cluster to be "geth 1", it performs the side effect of generating a cluster-data directory that will be used for the other two regions. So, we provision ireland first:

  • bin/intl-ireland apply

Then we can provision tokyo and virginia. You can do these two steps in parallel (e.g. in different terminals) if you'd like:

  • bin/intl-tokyo apply
  • bin/intl-virginia apply

Once all three regions have been provisioned, we need to start the cluster. In single-region clusters this is done automatically, but in multi-region clusters, it's manual. This will set up SSH tunnels between regions for secure communication between them, then start constellation and quorum on each node. Note here we specify the name of the cross-region cluster, intl.

  • bin/multi-start intl

At this point, we should be able to log in to one of the nodes and see the cluster in action:

  • ssh ubuntu@$(bin/intl-virginia output eip) where eip stands for Elastic IP, the static IP address other nodes in the cluster can use to connect to this one.
  • ./spam 10 send in 10 transactions per second for a few seconds, then ^C to stop it
  • ./follow shows the end of the (tail -f/followed) geth log, or ./attach attaches to the local node.