An often required feature of any declarative software or scripting is to work with time values. Much of the time this requirement doesn’t crawl out of the woodwork until you’ve been working with it for a while (at least that’s usually my experience). It was a relief to learn that Terraform does have this function, but the use is a little out of the ordinary and takes a bit of . . .
In a previous post we looked at setting up centralised Terraform state management using S3 for AWS provisioning (as well as using Azure Object Storage for the same solution in Azure before that). What our S3 solution lacked however is a means to achieve State Locking, I.E. any method to prevent two operators or systems from writing to a state at the same time and thus running the risk of . . .
Recently I’ve spent a good amount of time looking at options for managing Kubernetes Secrets with Vault. Hashicorp being a great supporter of the Cloud Native philosophy, it’s little surprise to find that they provide a multitude of options to integrate with Kubernetes and provide extensive documentation here. for my needs I found that the suggested configurations were either unsuitable or required a degree of over-engineering so I’m going to . . .
In a previous post we looked at a method to use Terraform’s output function to export return data and load it in to an external YAML file for consumption by Ansible. While this is a useful function it’s a little topheavy, and if we just want to pass data in to another Terraform configuration in order to run an apply operation, we have a means to work a lot more . . .
UPDATED 11/2020: Have a look at a different method for this configuration better suited to CI/CD. In a previous post we looked at how to use Terraform provision and authenticate with Clusters using AWS’ Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) using the somewhat unique authentication method of it’s webhook token method leveraging aws-iam-authenticator. Once we get past that point however we still have another permission hurdle to overcome, specifically how we handle . . .
NOTE: The sample code used here is hosted in my GitHub here. Recently I’ve been getting my hands dirtier and dirtier with Kubernetes but there’s some interesting oddities that only occur in Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), the AWS PaaS Kubernetes platform, especially when it comes to how you can authenticate. As Kubernetes is strongly driven by a declarative (and by extension Infrastructure as Code) philosophy, it makes perfect sense that . . .
In the last post we looked at how to automate the creation of GKE Kubernetes clusters in GCP, however the deployment of workloads to these clusters was still something of a manual process. Enter Helm; the a package manager for Kubernetes. If this is your first time hearing those words it can be pretty confusing, typically when we think of package management we think of application packages or application dependencies . . .
Google Cloud Platform tends to be forgotten from the conversation a lot when talking about public cloud offerings, however their hosted Kubernetes offering GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) has for me been the best of the major offerings for getting to grips with the platform and the best reason to use GCP at all. Without much issue we can get Terraform integrated with GCP, provision and scale out clusters as we . . .
The creation of an Azure Site to Site VPN is (even by Software Defined Networking standards)…involved. This isn’t a problem unique to Azure and isn’t aided by the desire by vendors to call all of their components something unusual rather than the terminology that already exists. Setup is a very manual and time consuming process, however Terraform can completely automate and codify the process. Example code for this post can . . .
When working at scale with secret creation we can employ Vault’s Dynamic Secrets functions, however another less used and sometimes more flexible option is to leverage Terraform to create secrets at run time, allowing the injection of your secrets from pseudorandom secret generation in to Vault and then using these newly minted secrets further on in the creation process when creating resources in your cloud platform. Example code for this . . .