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