Beginner question on getting started guide (Vault on EKS)

Vault
1

Hi, new to Vault and was hoping someone can clarify a couple of points for me. I’m following this guide to install Vault on an EKS cluster: Vault Installation to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service via Helm | Vault - HashiCorp Learn

In this tutorial, MySQL is installed and Raft/integrated storage is configured.

  1. I thought the storage backend had to be one or the other, MySQL, or Raft (or one of the many other options). So if both are being installed, is MySQL being used as the storage backend and Raft is just being used to join the pods?
  2. If I did want to ditch MySQL and only use Raft as my storage backend, how can I accomplish this? I imagine I would need to delete the MySQL pod/services.
2

Raft is a protocol that Hashicorp has implemented into Vault for clustering… GitHub - hashicorp/raft: Golang implementation of the Raft consensus protocol So yes, if you’re using insert backend name here, you still are using Raft protocol to communicate between the nodes. With raft you also have storage options which is the Integrated Storage with Vault.

Check: Storage Migration tutorial - Consul to Integrated Storage | Vault - HashiCorp Learn for how to move your storage backend.

IMHO, too many people choose a database or even worse a cloud storage without understanding the crazy chances of data loss and latency that they’re adding in with very little benefit. I highly recommend Consul if you can use/do use Consul in other ways in your organization OR even better integrated storage – (v1.7+ minimum, v1.8+ recommended).

3

This is really helpful, thank you so much!

1 Like