Cloud Native Development with Google Cloud

Appendix. Deploying Skills Mapper

In most of this book, you have been using gcloud commands to deploy everything. If you wanted to ship the product, you could do what I have done in the book and produce a step-by-step guide to the commands. However, it is easy to make a mistake when following instructions. What would be much better is to automate all those commands in a way that could consistently deploy everything for you with a single command.

One option would be to put all the commands in shell scripts. However, when using gcloud commands you are effectively calling the Google Cloud API in the background. What is better is to use a tool that makes the same API calls but is designed for this type of automation. This is the principle of infrastructure as code (IaC).

In this appendix, you have the opportunity to set up everything discussed in this book in one go with automation.

Note

The code for this chapter is in the terraform folder of the GitHub repository.

Reintroducing Terraform

The tool designated for automating the creation of infrastructure in this context is Terraform, an open source offering from HashiCorp. Terraform exemplifies an IaC tool, a concept briefly explored in Chapter 5 when it was utilized to deploy the tag updater.

While Google Cloud offers a similar tool called Deployment Manager, it is limited to supporting only Google Cloud. On the other hand, Terraform’s applicability extends to all public clouds and various other types of infrastructure. This broader ...