halkyon / gke-terraform

Showcases using Terraform to provision a new VPC and GKE cluster with nodes.

Example GKE cluster using Terraform

This repository showcases using Terraform to provision a new network and a GKE cluster with nodes within.

By default, this will create a highly available cluster using a NAT gateway for outgoing traffic from private nodes.

See a high level overview of the GKE architecture.

Install and configure

Ensure that kubectl, gcloud, and terraform are installed first.

Ensure the Google Cloud CLI tools are initalised:

gcloud init

Once initialised, ensure your account is added to the Application Default Credentials (ADC) so Terraform can access them:

gcloud auth application-default login

Setup variables

In terraform.tfvars set the details according to your Google Cloud account.

project_id, location, and name are required to be set.

location can be set to a region or zone. See regional or zone specific cluster docs for more information.

An example terraform.tfvars file of using a single zone cluster with preemptible nodes:

project_id         = "my-project-123"
location           = "australia-southeast1-a"
name               = "mycluster"
node_type          = "n1-standard-1"
node_disk_type     = "pd-standard"
node_disk_size_gb  = 40
node_preemptible   = true
initial_node_count = 1
min_node_count     = 1
max_node_count     = 2

Check out a list of Google Cloud regions and zones for reference.

Provisioning

terraform init
terraform apply

Configure kubectl

Retrieve the cluster name and location using terraform show, then initialise kubectl configuration:

gcloud container clusters get-credentials mycluster --region australia-southeast1-a

Test it works

kubectl get nodes -o wide

Tearing down

terraform destroy

What now?

Check out google_container_cluster Terraform docs for more details on what GKE parameters can be changed using Terraform.

Some other things:

• General GKE docs
• Hardening your cluster's security