Getting started with Terraform for Google Cloud

Cloud engineers, DevOps engineers, and individuals who want to start using Terraform to automate infrastructure provisioning with a focus on Google Cloud Platform

• Define the business need for infrastructure as code and the benefits of using it in your environment.
• Explain the features and functionalities of Terraform.
• Use Terraform resources, variables, and output values to create Google Cloud infrastructure resources.
• Use Terraform modules to build reusable configurations.
• Explain Terraform state and its importance.

To get the most out of this course, participants should:

• Complete Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
• Have basic programming skills and familiarity with using CLI
• Have general familiarity with Google Cloud

• Compute Engine
• VPC Networking
• Cloud Storage
• Terraform
• Cloud Foundation Toolkit

Introduction to Terraform for Google Cloud

• Introduction to IaC
• What is infrastructure as code (IaC)?
• Problems IaC can solve
• Benefits of IaC
• Provisioning versus configuration
• Imperative versus declarative approach
• Introduction to Terraform
• Terraform overview
• Terraform features
• IaC configuration workflow
• Terraform use cases
• Using Terraform
• How to use Terraform
• Running Terraform in production
• Installing Terraform
• Authentication for Google Cloud

Terms and concepts

• The Author phase
• Terraform Directory structure
• Introduction to HCL syntax
• Resources
• Variables
• State
• Modules
• Terraform commands
• terraform init
• terraform plan
• terraform apply
• terraform fmt
• terraform destroy
• Terraform Validator tool
• Introduction
• Why use the Terraform Validator tool
• Validation workflow
• Terraform Validator use cases

Writing Infrastructure Code for Google Cloud

• Introduction to Resources
• Resources overview
• Syntax
• Example
• Refer a resource attribute
• Considerations to define a resource block
• Meta-arguments for resources
• Resource dependencies
• Implicit dependency
• Explicit dependency
• Introduction to Variables
• Overview
• Syntax to declare a variable
• Syntax to reference and assign a value to a variable
• Variables best practices
• Introduction to output values
• Output values overview
• Best practices
• Terraform Registry and CFT
• Introduction to Terraform Registry
• Introduction to CFT

Organizing and Reusing Configuration with Terraform Modules

• Introduction to modules:
• Why are modules needed
• What is a module?
• Example
• Reusing configurations by using modules
• Module sources
• Calling a module into the source configuration
• Using variables to parameterize your configuration
• Pass resource attributes using output variables
• Module use cases, benefits, and best practices

Introduction to Terraform State

• Introduction to Terraform state
• How information is stored in a Terraform state file
• Ways to save a state file
• Storing a state file in a Cloud Storage bucket
• Issues when storing the Terraform state locally
• Benefits of storing a state file in a Cloud Storage bucket
• Process of storing a Terraform state file remotely in a Cloud Storage bucket
• Terraform state best practices