Manage Teleport Resources with Infrastructure as Code

This section explains how to manage Teleport's dynamic resources, which make it possible to adjust the behavior of your Teleport cluster as your infrastructure changes. The design of dynamic resources enables you to manage them using infrastructure as code tools, including Terraform, Helm, and the Teleport tctl client tool.

What is a dynamic resource?

There are two ways to configure a Teleport cluster:

• Static configuration file: At startup, a Teleport process reads a configuration file from the local filesystem (the default path is /etc/teleport.yaml). Static configuration settings control aspects of a cluster that are not expected to change frequently, like the ports that services listen on.
• Dynamic resources: Dynamic resources control aspects of your cluster that are likely to change over time, such as roles, local users, and registered infrastructure resources.

This approach makes it possible to incrementally adjust your Teleport configuration without restarting Teleport instances.

A cluster is composed of different objects (i.e., resources) and there are three common operations that can be performed on them: get , create , and remove .

Every resource in Teleport has three required fields:

• kind: The type of resource
• name: A required field in the metadata to uniquely identify the resource
• version: The version of the resource format

All other fields are specific to a resource.

While Teleport Enterprise Cloud does not expose the static configuration file to operators, they do use a static configuration file for certain settings. Read how Teleport reconciles static and dynamic resources to understand how to see the values of static configuration settings that also appear in dynamic resources.

When examining a dynamic resource, note that some of the fields you will see are used only internally and are not meant to be changed. Others are reserved for future use.

Managing dynamic resources

Teleport provides three methods for applying dynamic resources: the tctl client tool, Teleport Terraform provider, and Kubernetes Operator.

All three methods connect to the Teleport Auth Service's gRPC endpoint in order to manipulate cluster resources stored on the Auth Service backend. The design of Teleport's configuration interface makes it well suited for infrastructure-as-code and GitOps approaches.

You can get started with tctl, the Terraform Provider, and the Kubernetes Operator by following:

• the "Managing Users and Roles with IaC" guide
• the "Creating Access Lists with IaC" guide
• the "Registering Agentless OpenSSH Servers with IaC" guide

For more information on Teleport roles, including the internal.logins trait we use in these example roles, see the Teleport Access Controls Reference.

YAML documents with tctl

You can define resources as YAML documents and apply them using the tctl client tool. Here is an example of a role resource that allows access to servers with the label env:test:

kind: role
version: v7
metadata:
  name: developer
spec:
  allow:
    logins: ['ubuntu', 'debian', '{{internal.logins}}']
    node_labels:
      'env': 'test'

Since tctl works from the local filesystem, you can write commands that apply all configuration documents in a directory tree. See the CLI reference for more information on tctl.

Teleport Terraform provider

Teleport's Terraform provider lets you manage your Teleport resources within the same infrastructure-as-code source as the rest of your infrastructure. There is a Terraform resource for each Teleport configuration resource. For example:

resource "teleport_role" "developer" {
  version = "v7"
  metadata = {
    name = "developer"
  }

  spec = {
    allow = {
      logins = ["ubuntu", "debian", "{{internal.logins}}"]

      node_labels = {
        key   = ["env"]
        value = ["test"]
      }
    }
  }
}

Get started with the Terraform provider.

Teleport Kubernetes Operator

The Teleport Kubernetes Operator lets you apply Teleport resources as Kubernetes resources so you can manage your Teleport settings alongside the rest of your Kubernetes infrastructure. Here is an example of a TeleportRoleV7 resource, which is equivalent to the two roles shown above:

apiVersion: resources.teleport.dev/v1
kind: TeleportRoleV7
metadata:
  name: developer
spec:
  allow:
    logins: ['ubuntu', 'debian', '{{internal.logins}}']
    node_labels:
      'env': 'test'

Get started with the Kubernetes Operator.

Reconciling the configuration file with dynamic resources

Some dynamic resources assign the same settings as fields within Teleport's static configuration file. For these fields, the Teleport Auth Service reconciles static and dynamic configurations on startup and when you create or remove a Teleport resource.

Configuration resources that apply to static configuration fields

There are four dynamic resources that share fields with the static configuration file:

• session_recording_config
• cluster_auth_preference
• cluster_networking_config
• ui_config

session_recording_config

cluster_auth_preference

cluster_networking_config

ui_config

Origin labels

The Teleport Auth Service applies the teleport.dev/origin label to configuration resources to indicate whether they originated from the static configuration file, a dynamic configuration resource, or the default value.

Here are possible values of the teleport.dev/origin label:

• defaults
• config-file
• dynamic
• terraform
• kubernetes

When the Auth Service starts up, it looks up the values of static configuration fields that correspond to fields in dynamic configuration resources. If any of these have values, it creates the corresponding dynamic configuration resources and stores them in its backend.

For any static configuration fields without a value, the Auth Service checks whether the backend contains the corresponding dynamic configuration resource. If not, it creates one with default values and the teleport.dev/origin=defaults label.

If you attempt to create a dynamic configuration resource after the Auth Service has already loaded the configuration from a static configuration file, the Auth Service will return an error.

If you remove a dynamic configuration resource, the Auth Service will restore its configuration fields to the default values and add the teleport.dev/origin=defaults label.

Further reading

Configuration references

• For a comprehensive reference of Teleport's static configuration options, read the Configuration Reference.
• To see the dynamic configuration resources available to apply, read the Configuration Resource Reference. There are also dedicated configuration resource references for applications and databases.

Other ways to use the Teleport API

The Teleport Kubernetes Operator, Terraform provider, and tctl are all clients of the Teleport Auth Service's gRPC API. To build your own API client to extend Teleport for your organization's needs, read our API guides.