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Version: 16.x

Part 1: Enroll Infrastructure with Terraform

This guide is Part One of the Teleport Terraform starter guide. Read the overview for the scope and purpose of the Terraform starter guide.

This guide shows you how to use Terraform to enroll infrastructure resources with Teleport. You will:

  • Deploy a pool of Teleport Agents running on virtual machines.
  • Label resources enrolled by the Agents with env:dev and env:prod so that, in Part Two, you can configure Teleport roles to enable access to these resources.

How it works​

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.

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

Prerequisites​

  • A running Teleport cluster version 16.2.0 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.

    Visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh.

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.

  • 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.

    For example:

    $ tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=email@example.com
    $ tctl status
    # Cluster  teleport.example.com
    # Version  16.4.8
    # 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​

In this step, you will download Terraform modules that show you how to get started enrolling Teleport resources. These modules are minimal examples of how Teleport Terraform resources work together to enable you to manage Teleport Agents.

After finishing this guide and becoming familiar with the setup, you should modify your Terraform configuration to accommodate your infrastructure in production.

  1. Navigate to your Terraform project directory.

  2. Fetch the Teleport code repository and copy the example Terraform configuration for this project into your current working directory. The following commands 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/terraform-starter/agent-installation teleport
    $ cp -R teleport-clone/examples/terraform-starter/aws cloud
    $ rm -rf teleport-clone

  3. Create a file called agent.tf with the following content, which configures the child modules you downloaded in the previous step:

    module "agent_installation_dev" {
      source      = "./teleport"
      agent_count = 1
      agent_labels = {
        env = "dev"
      }
      proxy_service_address = "teleport.example.com:443"
      teleport_edition      = "cloud"
      teleport_version      = "16.4.8"
    }

    module "agent_installation_prod" {
      source      = "./teleport"
      agent_count = 1
      agent_labels = {
        env = "prod"
      }
      proxy_service_address = "teleport.example.com:443"
      teleport_edition      = "cloud"
      teleport_version      = "16.4.8"
    }

    module "agent_deployment" {
      region           = ""
      source           = "./cloud"
      subnet_id        = ""
      userdata_scripts = concat(
        module.agent_installation_dev.userdata_scripts,
        module.agent_installation_prod.userdata_scripts
      )
    }

Each of the agent_installation_* module blocks produces a number of installation scripts equal to the agent_count input. Each installation script runs the Teleport SSH Service with a Teleport join token, labeling the Agent with the key/value pairs specified in agent_labels. This configuration passes all installation scripts to the agent_deployment module in order to run them on virtual machines, launching one VM per script.

As you scale your Teleport usage, you can increase this count to ease the load on each Agent.

Edit the agent_installation_dev and agent_installation_prod blocks in agent.tf as follows:

  1. 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.

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

  3. 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 "agent_deployment" block in agent.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 terraform-starter module for your Teleport cluster and cloud provider.

In your Terraform project directory, ensure that the file called provider.tf includes the following content:

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

    teleport = {
      source  = "terraform.releases.teleport.dev/gravitational/teleport"
      version = "~> 16.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "aws" {
  region = AWS_REGION
}

provider "teleport" {
  # Update addr to point to your Teleport Enterprise (managed) tenant URL's host:port
  addr               = PROXY_SERVICE_ADDRESS
}

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​

In this step, you will create a Teleport bot to apply your Terraform configuration. The bot will exist for one hour and will be granted the default terraform-provider role that can edit every resource the TF provider supports.

  1. Navigate to your Terraform project directory and run the following command. The evalcommand assigns environment variables in your shell to credentials for the Teleport Terraform provider:

    $ eval "$(tctl terraform env)"
    🔑 Detecting if MFA is required
    This is an admin-level action and requires MFA to complete
    Tap any security key
    Detected security key tap
    ⚙️ Creating temporary bot "tctl-terraform-env-82ab1a2e" and its token
    🤖 Using the temporary bot to obtain certificates
    🚀 Certificates obtained, you can now use Terraform in this terminal for 1h0m0s

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

  3. Apply the Terraform configuration:

    $ terraform init
    $ terraform apply

  4. 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

Further reading: How the module works​

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

Join token​

The terraform-starter 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:

resource "random_string" "token" {
  count            = var.agent_count
  length           = 32
  override_special = "-.+"
}

resource "teleport_provision_token" "agent" {
  count   = var.agent_count
  version = "v2"
  spec = {
    roles = ["Node"]
  }
  metadata = {
    name    = random_string.token[count.index].result
    expires = timeadd(timestamp(), "1h")
  }
}

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 terraform-starter module loads a user data script that creates a Teleport configuration file for the Agent:

#!/bin/bash

curl https://cdn.teleport.dev/install-v${teleport_version}.sh | bash -s ${teleport_version} ${teleport_edition}

echo ${token} > /var/lib/teleport/token
cat<<EOF >/etc/teleport.yaml
version: v3
teleport:
  auth_token: /var/lib/teleport/token
  proxy_server: ${proxy_service_address}
auth_service:
  enabled: false
proxy_service:
  enabled: false
ssh_service:
  enabled: true
  labels:
    role: agent-pool
    ${extra_labels}
EOF

systemctl restart teleport;

# Disable OpenSSH and any longstanding authorized keys.
systemctl disable --now ssh.service
find / -wholename "*/.ssh/authorized_keys" -delete


The configuration 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. It also adds the labels you configured using the agent_labels input of the module.

The script makes Teleport the only option for accessing Agent instances by disabling OpenSSH on startup and deleting any authorized public keys.

Virtual machine instances​

Each cloud-specific child module of terraform-starter 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:

data "aws_ami" "amazon_linux_2023" {
  most_recent = true

  filter {
    name   = "description"
    values = ["Amazon Linux 2023 AMI*"]
  }

  filter {
    name   = "architecture"
    values = ["x86_64"]
  }

  filter {
    name   = "virtualization-type"
    values = ["hvm"]
  }

  filter {
    name   = "owner-alias"
    values = ["amazon"]
  }
}

resource "aws_instance" "teleport_agent" {
  count                       = length(var.userdata_scripts)
  ami                         = data.aws_ami.amazon_linux_2023.id
  instance_type               = "t3.small"
  subnet_id                   = var.subnet_id
  user_data                   = var.userdata_scripts[count.index]
  associate_public_ip_address = var.insecure_direct_access

  // Adheres to security best practices
  monitoring = true

  metadata_options {
    http_endpoint = "enabled"
    http_tokens   = "required"
  }

  root_block_device {
    encrypted = true
  }
}

Next steps: More options for enrolling resources​

In Part One of the Terraform starter guide, we showed you how to use Terraform to deploy a pool of Teleport Agents in order to enroll infrastructure resources with Teleport. While the guide showed you how to enroll resources dynamically, by declaring Terraform resources for each infrastructure resource you want to enroll, you can protect more of your infrastructure with Teleport by:

  • Configuring Auto-Discovery
  • Configuring resource enrollment

Configure Auto-Discovery​

For a more scalable approach to enrolling resources than the one shown in this guide, configure the Teleport Discovery Service to automatically detect resources in your infrastructure and enroll them with the Teleport Auth Service.

To configure the Teleport Discovery Service:

  1. Edit the userdata script run by the Agent instances managed in the Terraform starter module. Follow the Auto-Discovery guides guides to configure the Discovery Service and enable your Agents to proxy the resources that the service enrolls.
  2. Add the Discovery role to the join token resource you created earlier. In this guide, the join token only has the Node role.
  3. Add roles to the join token resource that corresponds to the Agent services you want to proxy discovered resources. The roles to add depend on the resources you want to automatically enroll based on the Auto-Discovery guides guides.

Enroll resources manually​

You can also enroll resources manually, instructing Agents to proxy specific endpoints in your infrastructure. For information about manual enrollment, read the documentation section for each kind of resource you would like to enroll:

Once you are familiar with the process of enrolling a resource manually, you can edit your Terraform module to:

  1. Add token roles: The token resource you created has only the Node role, and you can add roles to authorize your Agents to proxy additional kinds of resources. Consult a guide to enrolling resources manually to determine the role to add to the token.
  2. Change the userdata script to enable additional Agent services additional infrastructure resources for your Agents to proxy.
  3. Deploy dynamic resources: Consult the Terraform provider reference for Terraform resources that you can apply in order to enroll dynamic resources in your infrastructure.