Modern Service Management With Consul and Vault

Track: Security
Skill Level: Intermediate
Room: Room A315
Time Slot: Fri 2/24, 10:30 AM
Tags: java , security , cloud , integration
Presentation Link
Abstract

Microservice and SOA architectures are becoming increasingly common today, even in traditional environments. As your systems grow more distributed, you’ll face challenges beyond those seen in monolithic applications.

  • Static property files and other simple techniques become too unwieldy to effectively manage configuration, especially for sensitive properties such as passwords.
  • As instances of a service come or go due to scaling, migration, or failure, the things which depend on that service need a way to find a valid current location.
  • With so much new inter-process communication, it is important to secure the REST and middleware traffic connecting your services.

In this session, we’ll look at modern tools like Consul and Vault for solving these problems of service discovery and monitoring, configuration management, and security.

  • Discuss the advantages of smart DNS over traditional load balancers.
  • Walk through some approaches for centralizing the configuration of all your services.
  • Show how to use Vault as a private certificate authority, for powerful control over your internal SSL communication.

Steve and Amit will approach the topic from an application development perspective and a DevOps perspective, respectively. We’ll cover popular abstraction layers such as Spring Cloud Config, but focus on framework-agnostic solutions.

Amit Khare

Amit is a Data Architect at BetterCloud. He joined BetterCloud in November 2014, and previously worked as a Consultant to General Electric.

Steve Perkins

Steve Perkins is a software architect at BetterCloud, building analytics, security, and advanced administration tools for SaaS applications. He has nearly 20 years of development experience, in environments ranging from conservative Fortune 500 companies to small startups. Steve has extensive experience with web development, but his primary focus areas have been EAI, security and identity management, and large scale data processing.

Steve is the author of “Hibernate Search by Example”, and has been a technical reviewer on several other books related to Scala, database management, and software testing. He is based in Atlanta, GA.