This repository is all of the material that was used for my talk at DevOpsDays Toronto 2019.
You -- an intrepid infrastructure engineer -- have been tasked with a green field application project on AWS. The team decided that embracing the codification of infrastructure as well as the applicaiton itself was crucial.
Two crucial problems:
- Nobody on the team has codified infrastructure before
- Despite having crafted a bang up whiteboard diagram, going from the picture to code feels like looking over the edge into the abyss.
A fairly standard, "three tier" deployment with a load balancer, pool of app servers, and a database. The load balancer is fronted by the CloudFlare CDN for DDoS protection and caching. There is also a bastion host setup for management and maintenance.
- Terraform 0.12.0+ installed
- An AWS account
- I've tried my best to use free tier eligible or low-cost service options
The AWS provider is currently configured in such a way that it expects your environment to have appropriate environment variables configured or have setup the AWS CLI with a default or named profile configured.
Note: you are creating real resources that could have real costs. Make sure you clean up your work and don't leave anything running!
There is a branch for each "milestone" of the progression toward the desired end state -- branching removes the need of shuffling the state files around between directories (as was done during the presentation).
Begin by switching to the "milestone-1" branch (git checkout milestone-1 on the CLI), the README.md file will display a diagram of the intended milestone of that iteration.
You'll then need to execute terraform init to pull in the needed providers. With that done, terraform plan will show you the resources that need to be created. terraform apply will create the resources. Continue moving through the branches in sequence (or skip a few ¯_(ツ)_/¯) and running init, plan and apply to progress through the updates to the infrastructure after taking a look at the diagram for that milestone.
Remember: when you are finished run terraform destroy to clean everything up (to avoid unncessary cloud charges).