63 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
63 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
---
|
||
layout: docs
|
||
page_title: Host discovery
|
||
description: |-
|
||
An overview of host discovery in Boundary
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
# Host discovery
|
||
|
||
Traditionally, connecting to remote hosts and services requires knowledge of
|
||
the endpoint’s connection info (e.g. the IP address and port of the service).
|
||
This creates complexity when managing the onboarding of new resources at scale
|
||
or dealing with dynamic, ephemeral services whose connection info frequently changes.
|
||
Furthermore, the increased operational overhead of having to manually manage and update
|
||
new or old resources is an inefficient use of time.
|
||
Resources should be tagged appropriately so that, depending on their identity, users
|
||
automatically have the resources that they are allowed to connect to.
|
||
|
||
**Host discovery** focuses on automating the process of onboarding new or
|
||
changed infrastructure resources – and their connection info – to Boundary
|
||
as hosts.
|
||
|
||
## Automated host discovery in Boundary
|
||
|
||
Boundary supports target/host discovery in three primary workflows:
|
||
|
||
**[Manual configuration](/boundary/tutorials/oss-administration/oss-manage-targets)**:
|
||
Boundary administrators can manually configure static
|
||
hosts and targets via the administrator UI and CLI. Manual configuration of
|
||
targets with static hosts requires knowledge of the IP address or endpoint used
|
||
to connect to a host.
|
||
|
||
**[Host discovery via configuration as code with Terraform](/boundary/tutorials/oss-getting-started/oss-getting-started-config)**:
|
||
Boundary is fully programmatically instrumented and the discovery and configuration of new
|
||
infrastructure targets can be automated with
|
||
[Boundary’s Terraform provider](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/boundary/latest/docs).
|
||
This allows for dynamic configuration of a host and target without the need
|
||
for prior knowledge of the target’s connection info.
|
||
|
||
**[Runtime host discovery via dynamic host catalogs](/boundary/tutorials/host-management/aws-host-catalogs)**:
|
||
Boundary dynamic host catalogs automate the ingestion of resources from
|
||
infrastructure providers into Boundary. Boundary hosts are automatically
|
||
created, updated and added to host sets in order to reflect the connection
|
||
information maintained in these providers. This removes the need to know
|
||
host connection info or reapply infrastructure as code templates to
|
||
configure new or changed resources.
|
||
|
||
## Dynamic host catalogs
|
||
Dynamic host catalogs are an agentless workflow for Boundary to
|
||
securely query infrastructure providers at runtime to discover and configure
|
||
new services. Boundary administrators can define rules for which
|
||
external resources should be ingested into the catalog by
|
||
[creating a host sets](/boundary/docs/concepts/domain-model/host-sets)
|
||
with an attributes filter. These filters specify which discovered hosts
|
||
should be members of the host set.
|
||
|
||
Boundary currently supports dynamic host catalog for AWS and
|
||
Azure and we will continue to grow this ecosystem to support additional providers.
|
||
|
||
You can get started with dynamic host catalogs for AWS
|
||
[here](/boundary/tutorials/host-management/aws-host-catalogs)
|
||
and for Azure [here](/boundary/tutorials/host-management/azure-host-catalogs).
|