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Vault Demo

This repository creates an EC2 instance running Hashicorp Vault, using the filesystem storage backend to demo the Vault web user interface. The Vault user interface can be accessed over HTTPS from the Internet. The vault command-line can also be used by connecting to the EC2 instance over SSH from the Internet. A supporting VPC and security group are also created.

This is meant as a demo environment for Vault, and should not be used in production.

Prerequisites

This demo has been tested on Mac OS X. It requires either that Terraform is in your path, or that the curl, shasum, and unzip, commands are available to download Terraform into this repository.

By default the EC2 instance and security group are created in the eu-west-1 AWS region, using the default AWS profile. To change either of these, edit the provider.tf file and change the default line for the region or aws_profile variables.

A basic VPC is created using a single availability zone of b in the region configured in provider.tf. For example, if using the region eu-west-1, the VPC and EC2 instance will be created in the eu-west-1b availability zone. To change the availability zone, edit the availability_zone line of vpc.tf.

When accessing the Vault UI, you will need to acknowledge that the HTTPS SSL certificate is self signed; not from a valid certificate authority. This may require administrative access to add the certificate to your keychain, or if you do not want to do this, using a "private browsing" window.

Creating The Demo

Run the vault-demo.sh shell script, which will:

  • Create an SSH key which can be used to SSH into the EC2 instance.
  • Verify Terraform is in your path, and if not, download it to this repository.
  • Use Terraform to create an EC2 instance and security group which allows the Internet to access SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS.
  • Wait for the Nginx web server to respond on the EC2 instance.
  • Retrieve the Vault keys and initial root token from the EC2 instance and display them so you can unseal the Vault using the UI.
  • Open your default web browser to the Vault user interface on the EC2 instance.
    • Note you will need to accept the self-signed SSL certificate in your browser.

Please keep the terraform.tfstate file which Terraform generates, until you have used Terraform to clean up the resources created by this demo.

Clean Up

When you are done with this demo, clean up the AWS resources by running terraform destroy from within this repository directory. IF you didn't already have Terraform in your path, use ./terraform destroy to use the copy of Terraform which this script downloaded. Keep the terraform.tfstate file so that Terraform is aware of the AWS resources that its managing until you have destroyed this demo.

Known Issues / Room For Improvement

  • IF the EC2 instance is stopped then started again, it will have a different public IP address which no longer matches the CN of the SSL certificate. I didn't think this demo warranted an AWS Elastic IP Address, which could incur charges if the EC2 is stopped and the EIP is not in use.
  • Vault does not use SSL - while this isn't an issue on the loopback interface between Nginx and Vault, it might be possible to use the vault CLI from a workstation to remotely access this demo if Vault managed SSL instead of Nginx.
  • It may be strange or inconvenient that the VPC, and therefore the EC2 instance, is created in availability zone B of the AWS region.