This tutorial explains how to manage infrastructure as code with Terraform and Cloud Build using the popular GitOps methodology. The term GitOps was first coined by Weaveworks, and its key concept is using a Git repository to store the environment state that you want. Terraform is a HashiCorp open source tool that lets you predictably create, change, and improve your cloud infrastructure by using code. In this tutorial, you use Cloud Build, a Google Cloud continuous integration service, to automatically apply Terraform manifests to your environment.
This tutorial is for developers and operators who are looking for an elegant strategy to predictably make changes to infrastructure. The article assumes you are familiar with Google Cloud, and Linux.
The State of DevOps reports identified capabilities that drive software delivery performance. This tutorial will help you with the following capabilities:
Architecture
This tutorial applies GitOps practices for managing Terraform executions. Note
that it uses Secure Source Manager branches dev
and prod
to represent
actual environments. These environments are defined by
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks dev
and prod
, respectively, within a
Google Cloud project.
The process starts when you push Terraform code to either the dev
or prod
branch. In this scenario, Cloud Build triggers and then applies
Terraform manifests to achieve the state you want in the respective environment.
On the other hand, when you push Terraform code to any other branch—for example,
to a feature branch — Cloud Build runs to execute terraform plan
, but
nothing is applied to any environment.
Ideally, either developers or operators must make infrastructure proposals to development or feature branches, and then submit them through pull requests. This way, you can discuss and review the potential changes with collaborators and add follow-up commits before changes are merged into the base branch.
If no concerns are raised, you must first merge the changes to the dev
branch. This merge triggers an infrastructure deployment to the dev
environment, allowing you to test this environment. After you have tested and
are confident about what was deployed, you must merge the dev
branch into the
prod
branch to trigger the infrastructure installation to the production
environment.
Objectives
- Set up your Secure Source Manager instance and repository.
- Configure Terraform to store state in a Cloud Storage bucket.
- Grant permissions to your Cloud Build service account.
- Connect Cloud Build to your Secure Source Manager repository.
- Change your environment configuration in a feature branch.
- Promote changes to the development environment.
- Promote changes to the production environment.
Costs
In this document, you use the following billable components of Google Cloud:
To generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage,
use the pricing calculator.
When you finish the tasks that are described in this document, you can avoid continued billing by deleting the resources that you created. For more information, see Clean up.
Before you begin
- Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.
-
In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.
-
Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.
-
In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.
-
Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.
-
In the Google Cloud console, activate Cloud Shell.
At the bottom of the Google Cloud console, a Cloud Shell session starts and displays a command-line prompt. Cloud Shell is a shell environment with the Google Cloud CLI already installed and with values already set for your current project. It can take a few seconds for the session to initialize.
- In Cloud Shell, get the ID of the project you just selected:
If this command doesn't return the project ID, configure Cloud Shell to use your project. Replacegcloud config get-value project
PROJECT_ID
with your project ID.gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
- Enable the required APIs:
This step might take a few minutes to finish.gcloud services enable cloudbuild.googleapis.com compute.googleapis.com securesourcemanager.googleapis.com
- If you've never used Git in Cloud Shell, configure it with your
name and email address:
Git uses this information to identify you as the author of the commits that you create in Cloud Shell.git config --global user.email "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS" git config --global user.name "YOUR_NAME"
Set up your Secure Source Manager repository
In this tutorial, you use a single Secure Source Manager repository to define your cloud infrastructure. You orchestrate this infrastructure by having different branches corresponding to different environments:
- The
dev
branch contains the latest changes that are applied to the development environment. - The
prod
branch contains the latest changes that are applied to the production environment. - Feature branches similar to
feature_x
are used to make changes before pushing to thedev
orprod
branches.
With this infrastructure, you can always reference the repository to know what
configuration is expected in each environment and to propose new changes by
first merging them into the dev
environment. You then promote the changes by
merging the dev
branch into the subsequent prod
branch.
- Create an empty Secure Source Manager repository - don't initialize the repository.
Add the Secure Source Manager authentication helper to your global
git config
by running the following command:git config --global credential.'https://*.*.sourcemanager.dev'.helper gcloud.sh
The authentication helper uses the gcloud CLI to fetch your Google Cloud credentials when using Git commands with Secure Source Manager.
To re-authenticate after the initial credential setup, run the following gcloud CLI command:
gcloud auth login
Clone the solutions-terraform-cloudbuild-gitops repository to your local shell or working environment:
git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/solutions-terraform-cloudbuild-gitops.git
Add your Secure Source Manager repository as an upstream.
git remote add google HTTPS_REPO_URL
Where
HTTPS_REP_URL
is the HTTPS URL for your Secure Source Manager repository. You can find the URL at the top of your repository page in the Secure Source Manager web interface.Create and switch to your
dev
branch.git checkout dev
Push the cloned repository to your repository with the following command:
git push -u google --all
Repeat the previous two steps for your
prod
branch.
The code in this repository is structured as follows:
The
environments/
folder contains subfolders that represent environments, such asdev
andprod
, which provide logical separation between workloads at different stages of maturity, development and production, respectively. Although it's a good practice to have these environments as similar as possible, each subfolder has its own Terraform configuration to ensure they can have unique settings as necessary.The
modules/
folder contains inline Terraform modules. These modules represent logical groupings of related resources and are used to share code across different environments.The
cloudbuild.yaml
file is a build configuration file that contains instructions for Cloud Build, such as how to perform tasks based on a set of steps. This file specifies a conditional execution depending on the branch Cloud Build is fetching the code from, for example:For
dev
andprod
branches, the following steps are executed:terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply
For any other branch, the following steps are executed:
terraform init
for allenvironments
subfoldersterraform plan
for allenvironments
subfolders
To ensure that the changes being proposed are appropriate for every environment,
terraform init
and terraform plan
are run for all environments
subfolders. Before merging the pull request, you can review the plans
to make sure that access isn't being granted to an unauthorized entity, for
example.
Modify the build configuration file
To make the sample build configuration file work with Secure Source Manager, you need to make the following edits:
- Add a step to clone your repository.
- Add a step to get the branch name and assign it to a variable.
Edit the build configuration file in the dev
branch:
Change to the
dev
branch:git checkout dev
Open the
cloudbuild.yaml
file and replace the contents with the following:# Copyright 2019 Google LLC # # Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); # you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. # You may obtain a copy of the License at # # https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 # # Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software # distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, # WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. # See the License for the specific language governing permissions and # limitations under the License. steps: - id: 'clone repository' name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/git' args: - clone - '${_REPO_URL}' - . - id: 'branch name' name: gcr.io/cloud-builders/git entrypoint: 'sh' args: - '-c' - | branch=$(basename "$_REF") git checkout ${branch} echo "***********************" git branch --show-current echo "***********************" - id: 'tf init' name: 'hashicorp/terraform:1.0.0' entrypoint: 'sh' args: - '-c' - | branch=$(basename "$_REF") if [ -d "environments/${branch}/" ]; then cd environments/${branch} terraform init else for dir in environments/*/ do cd ${dir} env=${dir%*/} env=${env#*/} echo "" echo "*************** TERRAFORM INIT ******************" echo "******* At environment: ${env} ********" echo "*************************************************" terraform init || exit 1 cd ../../ done fi - id: 'tf plan' name: 'hashicorp/terraform:1.0.0' entrypoint: 'sh' args: - '-c' - | branch=$(basename "$_REF") if [ -d "environments/${branch}/" ]; then cd environments/${branch} terraform plan else for dir in environments/*/ do cd ${dir} env=${dir%*/} env=${env#*/} echo "" echo "*************** TERRAFOM PLAN ******************" echo "******* At environment: ${env} ********" echo "*************************************************" terraform plan || exit 1 cd ../../ done fi - id: 'tf apply' name: 'hashicorp/terraform:1.0.0' entrypoint: 'sh' args: - '-c' - | branch=$(basename "$_REF") if [ -d "environments/${branch}/" ]; then cd environments/${branch} terraform apply -auto-approve else echo "***************************** SKIPPING APPLYING *******************************" echo "Branch '${branch}' does not represent an official environment." echo "*******************************************************************************" fi
Check that the file is modified.
git status
Commit and push your changes:
git add --all git commit -m "Modify build config file." git push google dev
Open a pull request to quickly promote your changes to the
prod
branch.- In the Secure Source Manager web interface, navigate to your repository.
- Click the Pull requests tab.
- Click New pull request.
- In the merge into: field, select the
prod
branch. - In the pull from: field, select the
dev
branch. - Review the changes, then click New pull request.
- Click Create pull request.
- Click Merge pull request.
Click Merge pull request again.
The changes are merged into your
prod
branch.
Configuring Terraform to store state in a Cloud Storage bucket
By default, Terraform stores
state
locally in a file named terraform.tfstate
. This default configuration can
make Terraform usage difficult for teams, especially when many users run
Terraform at the same time and each machine has its own understanding of the
current infrastructure.
To help you avoid such issues, this section configures a
remote state
that points to a Cloud Storage bucket. Remote state is a feature of
backends
and, in this tutorial, is configured in the backend.tf
files—for example:
In the following steps, you create a Cloud Storage bucket and change a few files to point to your new bucket and your Google Cloud project.
In Cloud Shell, create the Cloud Storage bucket:
PROJECT_ID=$(gcloud config get-value project) gcloud storage buckets create gs://${PROJECT_ID}-tfstate
Enable Object Versioning to keep the history of your deployments:
gcloud storage buckets update gs://${PROJECT_ID}-tfstate --versioning
Enabling Object Versioning increases storage costs, which you can mitigate by configuring Object Lifecycle Management to delete earlier state versions.
Create a new
cloud-storage-bucket
branch to make your changes in:cd ~/solutions-terraform-cloudbuild-gitops git checkout -b cloud-storage-bucket
Replace the
PROJECT_ID
placeholder with the project ID in both theterraform.tfvars
andbackend.tf
files:sed -i s/PROJECT_ID/$PROJECT_ID/g environments/*/terraform.tfvars sed -i s/PROJECT_ID/$PROJECT_ID/g environments/*/backend.tf
On OS X or macOS, you might need to add two quotation marks (
""
) aftersed -i
, as follows:sed -i "" s/PROJECT_ID/$PROJECT_ID/g environments/*/terraform.tfvars sed -i "" s/PROJECT_ID/$PROJECT_ID/g environments/*/backend.tf
Check whether all files were updated:
git status
The output looks like this:
On branch cloud-storage-bucket Changes not staged for commit: (use "git add
..." to update what will be committed) (use "git restore ..." to discard changes in working directory) modified: environments/dev/backend.tf modified: environments/dev/terraform.tfvars modified: environments/prod/backend.tf modified: environments/prod/terraform.tfvars no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a") Commit and push your changes:
git add --all git commit -m "Update project IDs and buckets" git push google -u cloud-storage-bucket
Your new
cloud-storage-bucket
branch is pushed to your repository.Merge your
cloud-storage-bucket
changes into yourdev
andprod
branches by opening and submitting merge requests for each branch.
Grant permissions to your Cloud Build service account
To allow Cloud Build service account to run Terraform scripts with the goal of managing Google Cloud resources, you need to grant it appropriate access to your project. For simplicity, project editor access is granted in this tutorial. For production environments, follow your company's IT security best practices, usually by providing least-privileged access.
To find the Cloud Build service account email, from the Cloud Build page, navigate to Settings.
Copy the value of the Service account email.
Grant the required access to your Cloud Build service account:
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT_ID \ --member serviceAccount:CLOUDBUILD_SA --role roles/editor
Replace the following:
- PROJECT_ID with your project ID.
- CLOUDBUILD_SA with the Cloud Build service account email.
Connect to Cloud Build
To trigger Cloud Build on a push to any branch, set up
a Secure Source Manager webhook. The build configuration file will check the
the branch name to determine if changes need to be made to the dev
or prod
environments.
Enable and set up Cloud Build in your project.
Open the Triggers page in the Google Cloud console.
Select your project from the project selector drop-down menu at the top of the page.
Click Open.
Click Create trigger.
Enter the following trigger settings:
Name:
trigger-on-push
Region: select the region for your trigger. If the build configuration file associated with your trigger specifies a private pool, the region you select for your trigger must match the region of the private pool.
If you select
global
as your region, Cloud Build uses the region specified in your build configuration file to run your build. This can either be the region of the private pool, if you specify a private pool in your build configuration file, or the global default pool if you don't specify a private pool.Description (optional): Enter a description for your trigger.
Event: Select Webhook event as the repository event to invoke the trigger.
If Secret Manager is not installed, you are prompted to enable the Secret Manager.
Webhook URL: select one of the following:
- Use a new secret if you want to generate a new secret using Cloud Build. Click Create secret to create your secret.
- Use an existing secret or create your own if you want to use an existing secret. Enter the secret and version in the drop down selection boxes.
If you use an existing secret, you might need to manually grant the Secret Manager Secret Accessor role to the Cloud Build service agent
service-PROJECT_NUMBER@gcp-sa-cloudbuild.iam.gserviceaccount.com
.To learn more, see Granting a role to the Cloud Build service agent.
Click Show URL preview and record the URL. You need this URL to set up the webhook in Secure Source Manager.
- Configuration: for Type select Cloud Build configuration file (YAML or JSON) and for Location, select Inline.
Click the Open Editor button to edit your build configuration file.
Copy the contents of your
cloudbuild.yaml
file into the editor.As discussed previously, this pipeline has different behaviors depending on the branch being fetched. The build checks whether the
${branch}
variable matches any environment folder. If so, Cloud Build executesterraform plan
for that environment. Otherwise, Cloud Build executesterraform plan
for all environments to make sure that the proposed change is appropriate for all of them. If any of these plans fail to execute, the build fails.- id: 'tf plan' name: 'hashicorp/terraform:1.0.0' entrypoint: 'sh' args: - '-c' - | branch=$(basename "$_REF") if [ -d "environments/${branch}/" ]; then cd environments/${branch} terraform plan else for dir in environments/*/ do cd ${dir} env=${dir%*/} env=${env#*/} echo "" echo "*************** TERRAFOM PLAN ******************" echo "******* At environment: ${env} ********" echo "*************************************************" terraform plan || exit 1 cd ../../ done fi
The
terraform apply
command runs for environment branches, but it is completely ignored in any other case.Click + Add variable and add the following two substitution variables:
- Variable:
_REPO_URL
, Value:$(body.repository.clone_url)
- Variable:
_REF
, Value:$(body.ref)
- Variable:
Click Create.
Set up a webhook in Secure Source Manager
Create a webhook to trigger builds on pushes to your dev
or prod
branches.
- In the Secure Source Manager web interface, navigate to the repository you want to create a webhook for.
- Click Settings.
- Click Webhooks, and then click Add webhook.
In the Hook ID field, enter an ID for the webhook.
In the Target URL field, enter the Webhook URL you copied when you set up a webhook trigger in Cloud Build.
To find the Webhook URL:
Open the Triggers page in the Google Cloud console.
Click your trigger.
In the Webhook URL section, click Show URL preview and copy URL.
The Webhook URL contains your key and secret values entered when you created your Cloud Build trigger. To prevent leaking these values, remove them from the end of the target URL and copy to the Sensitive Query String field.
To locate your key and secret in your webhook URL, look for the text starting with
key=
For example, given the following URL:
https://cloudbuild.googleapis.com/v1/projects/my-project/triggers/test-trigger:webhook?key=eitIfKhYnv0LrkdsyHqIros8fbsheKRIslfsdngf&secret=Hello%20Secret%20Manager
Copy and remove the portion starting with the question mark
?key=...
from the Target URL field. Then remove the initial question mark, move the remaining portionkey=...
to the Sensitive Query String field.Click Add webhook.
The webhook is displayed in the Webhooks page.
Change your environment configuration in a new feature branch
Make sure you are in the
dev
branch:cd ~/solutions-terraform-cloudbuild-gitops git checkout dev
Pull the latest changes:
git pull
Create a
bug-fix
branch to change the environment configuration.git checkout -b bug-fix
Open
modules/firewall/main.tf
to edit.On line 30, fix the
"http-server2"
typo intarget_tags
field.The value must be
"http-server"
.Commit and push your changes:
git add --all git commit -m "Fix typo." git push google -u bug-fix
Open the Cloud Build History page in the Google Cloud console:
Click the Build to see more information, including the output of the
terraform plan
.
Note that the Cloud Build job ran the pipeline defined in the
cloudbuild.yaml
file. As discussed previously, this pipeline has different
behaviors depending on the branch being fetched. The build checks whether the
${branch}
variable matches any environment folder. If so,
Cloud Build executes terraform plan
for that environment.
Otherwise, Cloud Build executes terraform plan
for all environments
to make sure that the proposed change is appropriate for all of them. If any of
these plans fail to execute, the build fails.
- id: 'tf plan' name: 'hashicorp/terraform:1.0.0' entrypoint: 'sh' args: - '-c' - | branch=$(basename "$_REF") if [ -d "environments/${branch}/" ]; then cd environments/${branch} terraform plan else for dir in environments/*/ do cd ${dir} env=${dir%*/} env=${env#*/} echo "" echo "*************** TERRAFOM PLAN ******************" echo "******* At environment: ${env} ********" echo "*************************************************" terraform plan || exit 1 cd ../../ done fi
Similarly, the terraform apply
command runs for environment branches, but it
is completely ignored in any other case. In this section, you have submitted a
code change to a new branch, so no infrastructure deployments were applied to
your Google Cloud project.
Promoting changes to the development environment
It's time to apply the state you want to your dev
environment.
- In the Secure Source Manager web interface, navigate to your repository.
- Click the New pull request
- In the merge into: field, select your
dev
branch. - In the pull from: field, select your
bug-fix
branch. - Click New pull request.
- Click Create pull request.
- Click Merge pull request, and then click Merge pull request again.
Check that a new Cloud Build has been triggered:
Open the build and check the logs.
When the build finishes, you see something like this:
Step #3 - "tf apply": external_ip = EXTERNAL_IP_VALUE Step #3 - "tf apply": firewall_rule = dev-allow-http Step #3 - "tf apply": instance_name = dev-apache2-instance Step #3 - "tf apply": network = dev Step #3 - "tf apply": subnet = dev-subnet-01
Copy
EXTERNAL_IP_VALUE
and open the address in a web browser.http://EXTERNAL_IP_VALUE
This provisioning might take a few seconds to boot the VM and to propagate the firewall rule. Eventually, you see Environment: dev in the web browser.
Navigate to Cloud Storage:
Select your project.
Click your Terraform state storage bucket. The bucket name looks like the following:
PROJECT_ID-tfstate
Click env, and then dev to view your Terraform state file.
Promoting changes to the production environment
Now that you have your development environment fully tested, you can promote your infrastructure code to production.
- In the Secure Source Manager web interface, navigate to your repository.
- Click the Pull requests tab.
- Click New pull request.
- For the merge into:, select your repository
prod
branch. - For pull from:, select your repository
dev
branch. - Click New pull request.
- For title, enter a title such as "Promoting networking changes", and then click Create pull request.
Review the proposed changes, and then click Merge pull request.
The date and repository URL are added in the comment field.
Click Merge pull request again to confirm.
In the Google Cloud console, open the Build History page to see your changes being applied to the production environment:
Wait for the build to finish, and then check the logs.
At the end of the logs, you see something like this:
Step #3 - "tf apply": external_ip = EXTERNAL_IP_VALUE Step #3 - "tf apply": firewall_rule = prod-allow-http Step #3 - "tf apply": instance_name = prod-apache2-instance Step #3 - "tf apply": network = prod Step #3 - "tf apply": subnet = prod-subnet-01
Copy
EXTERNAL_IP_VALUE
and open the address in a web browser.http://EXTERNAL_IP_VALUE
This provisioning might take a few seconds to boot the VM and to propagate the firewall rule. Eventually, you see Environment: prod in the web browser.
Navigate to Cloud Storage:
Select your project.
Click your Terraform state storage bucket. The bucket name looks like the following:
PROJECT_ID-tfstate
Click env, and then prod to view your Terraform state file.
You have successfully configured a serverless infrastructure-as-code pipeline on Cloud Build. In the future, you might want to try the following:
- Add deployments for separate use cases.
- Create additional environments to reflect your needs.
- Use a project per environment instead of a VPC per environment.
Clean up
After you've finished the tutorial, clean up the resources you created on Google Cloud so you won't be billed for them in the future.
Deleting the project
- In the Google Cloud console, go to the Manage resources page.
- In the project list, select the project that you want to delete, and then click Delete.
- In the dialog, type the project ID, and then click Shut down to delete the project.
What's next
- Consider using Cloud Foundation Toolkit templates to quickly build a repeatable enterprise-ready foundation in Google Cloud.
- Watch Repeatable Google Cloud Environments at Scale With Cloud Build Infra-As-Code Pipelines from Next' 19 about the GitOps workflow described in this tutorial.
- Check out the GitOps-style continuous delivery with Cloud Build tutorial.
- Take a look at more advanced Cloud Build features: Configuring the order of build steps, Building, testing, and deploying artifacts, and Creating custom build steps.
- Check out the blog on Ensuring scale and compliance of your Terraform Deployment with Cloud Build.
- Read our resources about DevOps.
- Learn more about the DevOps capabilities related to this tutorial:
- Take the DevOps quick check to understand where you stand in comparison with the rest of the industry.