Deploying with Terraform – Deploying Skills Mapper

by Ali Axelrod Command Line Interface, Exams of Google Cloud, Google Cloud Certification Exams, Kubernetes Configuration, Reintroducing Terraform

To deploy the environment, you need to run the Terraform commands in the terraform directory.

First, initialize Terraform to download the needed plugins with:

terraform
init

Then check that you have set the required variables in your terraform.tfvars with:

terraform
validate

All being well, you should see Success! The configuration is valid.

Although Terraform can enable Google Services, and these scripts do, it can be unreliable as services take time to enable. Use the enable_service.sh script to enable services with gcloud:

./enable_services.sh

Terraform will then show how many items would be added, changed, or destroyed. If you have not run Terraform on the projects before, you should see a lot of items to be added.

When you are ready, run the apply command:

terraform
apply

Again, Terraform will devise a plan for meeting the desired state. This time, it will prompt you to approve applying the plan. Enter yes and watch while Terraform creates everything from this book for you. This may take 30 minutes, the majority of which will be the creation of the Cloud SQL database used by the fact service.

When completed, you will see several outputs from Terraform that look like this:

application-project = “skillsmapper-application”
git-commit = “3ecff393be00e331bb4412f4dc24a3caab2e0ab8”
management-project = “skillsmapper-management”
public-domain = “skillsmapper.org”
public-ip = “34.36.189.201”
tfstate_bucket_name = “d87cf08d1d01901c-bucket-tfstate”

The public-ip is the external IP of the global load balancer. Use this to create an A record in your DNS provider for the domain you provided.

Reapplying Terraform

If you make a change to the Terraform configuration, there are a few things you need to do before deploying Terraform again.

First, make sure you are using the application project:

gcloud
config
set
project
$APPLICATION_PROJECT_ID

Terraform is unable to change the API Gateway configuration, so you will need to delete it and allow Terraform to recreate it.

Also, if Cloud Run has deployed new versions of the services, you will need to remove them and allow Terraform to recreate them, too, as Terraform will have the wrong version.

This time you will notice only a few added, changed, or destroyed resources, as Terraform only applies the differences to what is already there.

Deleting Everything

When you have finished with Skills Mapper, you can also use Terraform to clean up completely using:

terraform
destroy

This will remove all the infrastructure that Terraform has created.

At this point, you may also like to unlink the billing accounts from the projects so they can no longer be billed: gcloud
beta
billing
projects
unlink
$APPLICATION_PROJECT_ID
gcloud
beta
billing
projects
unlink
$MANAGEMENT_PROJECT_ID