Cloud Bootcamp: DevOps

I'm excited to put my newfound knowledge into practice and continue exploring the ever-evolving world of cloud engineering and DevOps. Together, let's embrace automation, enhance efficiency, and deliver remarkable software solutions!

  Terraform

What is Infrastructure as Code? Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools allow you to manage infrastructure with configuration files rather than through a graphical user interface. IaC allows you to build, change, and manage your infrastructure safely, consistently, and repeatedly by defining resource configurations that you can version, reuse, and share. Terraform is HashiCorp's infrastructure as code tool. It lets you define resources and infrastructure in human-readable, declarative configuration files and manages your infrastructure's lifecycle. Using Terraform has several advantages over manually managing your infrastructure

The steps below will get you started with Terraform.

1.    Install Terraform

2. Install Chocolately first

3.   Then run this command choco install terraform

4.   Verify the installation: terraform -help

5.    Build Infrastructure(EC2)

6. Create a folder for terraform on your desktop

7.   Create a text file inside your terraform folder called main.tf

8.   Add your code to the main.tf file and save it

9.   Initialize the directory: terraform init

10.   Format the configuration: terraform fmt

11.   Validate the configuration: terraform validate

12.   Create infrastructure: terraform apply

13.   Inspect state: terraform show

14.    Change Infrastructure

15.   Edit your main.tf file

16. Apply changes: terraform apply

17.    Destroy Infrastructure

18. terraform destroy

19.   Define Input Variables

20.   Edit the name in the main.tf file

21.   Create a variables.tf file with the new name

22.   Update the instances name: terraform apply -var "instance_name=YetAnotherName"

23.    Query Data with Outputs

24.   Create an outputs.tf file

25. Apply new configuration: terraform apply

26.   Query the output: terraform output

Create IAM Policies with Terraform

1.    Clone the example repository

2.   Clone the Create IAM policies with Terraform repository

3.    Review the IAM policy resource

4.    Refactor your policy

5.    Create a policy attachment

6.    Create your user, bucket, and policy

7.    Test the policy

I was able to create the policy successfully.

1. This tutorial focuses on creating IAM policies using Terraform. IAM policies are used to assign explicit permissions to IAM identities (users, groups, or roles) for accessing AWS resources. The tutorial highlights the advantages of managing IAM policies with Terraform and provides step-by-step instructions to create an IAM user, an S3 bucket, and an IAM policy.

2. Here's a summary of the tutorial steps:

3. Prerequisites: Ensure that you have Terraform v1.2+ installed, a Terraform Cloud account, AWS CLI, IAM administrative permissions, and AWS credentials configured in Terraform Cloud.

4. Clone the example repository: Clone the repository containing the example code for creating IAM policies with Terraform.

5. Review the IAM policy resource: Open the main.tf file and review the IAM policy resource, S3 bucket, and IAM user configurations. The IAM policy resource defines the policy privileges using a JSON document.

6. Refactor the policy: Refactor the policy by using the aws_iam_policy_document data source, which generates a JSON representation of the IAM policy document. This approach offers flexibility, reusability, and automatic JSON formatting.

7. Create a policy attachment: Add a policy attachment resource to apply the policy to the IAM user. This step ensures that the policy is applied to the desired users or roles.

8. Apply the configuration: Initialize the Terraform configuration, apply the changes, and create the IAM user, S3 bucket, and policy.

9. Test the policy: Use the AWS Policy Simulator to test the policy's effectiveness. Verify that the user is denied actions like deleting objects or buckets in the S3 service but allowed to perform actions on the specific bucket created in the configuration.

10. Clean up: Destroy the infrastructure created in the tutorial using the terraform destroy command. If using Terraform Cloud, delete the workspace associated with the tutorial.

11. By following this tutorial, you can learn how to create and manage IAM policies using Terraform, ensuring granular control over access to your AWS resources.

Manage AWS auto-scaling groups with Terraform

1.    Clone example repository

2.    Review configuration

3.    Security groups

4.    Apply configuration

5.    Scale instances

6.   Use the AWS CLI to scale the number of instances in your ASG.

7.    Set lifecycle rule

8.    Add scaling policy

9.    Destroy configuration

10. This tutorial focuses on managing AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) using Terraform. ASGs allow you to scale and manage a collection of EC2 instances with the same configuration. Terraform is a tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources, and it supports the dynamic aspects of ASGs.

11. The tutorial covers the following steps:

12. Prerequisites: You need to have Terraform v1.1+ installed, an AWS account with Terraform credentials configured, and the AWS CLI.

13. Clone the example repository: Clone the repository that contains the Terraform configuration for creating an ASG.

14. Review the configuration: Open the main.tf file to review the configuration. It includes definitions for an EC2 Launch Configuration, an Auto Scaling Group, load balancer resources, and security groups.

15. Apply the configuration: Initialize your configuration with terraform init and then apply the configuration with terraform apply. This will create the VPC, networking resources, Auto Scaling group, launch configuration, load balancer, and target group.

16. Test the application: Use cURL to send a request to the load balancer endpoint and verify that the application is running.

17. Scale instances: Use the AWS CLI to scale the number of instances in your ASG. For example, you can use the aws autoscaling set-desired-capacity command to increase the desired capacity.

18. Set a lifecycle rule: To prevent Terraform from scaling instances when it changes other aspects of the configuration, add a lifecycle argument to the aws_autoscaling_group resource block. This rule ignores changes to the desired capacity and target groups.

19. By following this tutorial, you will learn how to provision and manage an Auto Scaling group using Terraform, configure scaling policies, and integrate it with other AWS resources such as load balancers.

Docker

 Creating a Docker container in Terraform

1.    Install docker

2.   Make sure docker is running

3. mkdir learn-terraform-docker-container

4. cd learn-terraform-docker-container

5.   create main.tf file

6.   terraform init

7. terraform apply

I had no issues. Creating a docker container with terraform.

8. Terraform destroy

This is how the Windows Docker desktop application looks.

How do I run a container

1.   Clone the repository at https://github.com/docker/welcome-to-docker.

2.    Open the sample application in your IDE. Note that it already has a Dockerfile. For your own projects you need to create this yourself.

3.    Build your first image: docker build -t welcome-to-docker /path/to/dockerfile-directory

4.    Run your container from Docker desktop

5.    Stop the container

Message you get when making your first docker container.

  Docker basics

1.    What is Docker?

     Virtualization software

   Makes developing and deploying applications much easier

2.   Packages application with all the necessary dependencies, configuration, system tools and runtime

3.    Problems Docker solves

4.   No configurations needed on the server

5.    Virtual machine vs Docker

6.   Containers take seconds to start vs VMs take minutes to start

7.   Docker images are a couple of MB vs VM images that are a couple of GB

8.   Docker Images vs Containers

9.   Docker containers are the live, running instances of Docker images. While Docker images are read-only files, containers are life, ephemeral, executable content.

10.    Docker Registries

      A storage and distribution system for Docker images

11.    Docker Image Versions

      Docker images are versioned and different versions are identified by tags

12. §  Docker run command- creates a new container

  GitHub actions

Terraform to Github:

1.    Setup Terraform Cloud

2.    Setup a Github repository

3.   Review Actions workflows

4.    Create pull requests

5.    Review and merge pull request

6.    Verify EC2 instance provisioned

7. This tutorial provides instructions on automating Terraform workflows using GitHub Actions and Terraform Cloud. Here is a summary of the steps involved:

8. Introduction: GitHub Actions is introduced as a tool for automating software builds, tests, and deployments, while Terraform is described as a tool for managing infrastructure as code.

9. Prerequisites: The tutorial assumes familiarity with Terraform and Terraform Cloud workflows and requires a GitHub account, Terraform Cloud account, and AWS account.

10. Set up Terraform Cloud: Create a new Terraform Cloud workspace, add AWS credentials as environment variables, and generate a Terraform Cloud user API token.

11. Set up a GitHub repository: Fork the Learn Terraform GitHub Actions template repository, set up repository secrets, and clone the repository to your local machine.

12. Review Actions workflows: Review the provided workflows for Terraform plan and Terraform apply.

13. Terraform plan workflow: Configure the workflow to run on pull requests, define environment variables, and set up steps for checking out the repository, uploading the configuration to Terraform Cloud, creating a speculative plan run, retrieving the plan output, and updating the pull request with the plan information.

14. Terraform apply workflow: Configure the workflow to run on pushes to the main branch, define environment variables, and set up steps for checking out the repository, uploading the configuration to Terraform Cloud, and creating and applying an apply run.

15. Create pull request: Create a new branch, commit the organization name changes, and push the changes to trigger the Terraform plan workflow.

16. Review and merge pull request: Review the pull request and merge it, triggering the Terraform plan workflow. View the speculative plan in Terraform Cloud.

17. Verify EC2 instance provisioned: After merging the pull request, go to GitHub Actions, select the Terraform Apply workflow, and wait for it to complete. Click the link to view the run in Terraform Cloud and verify that the EC2 instance is provisioned.

18. Destroy resources: To clean up, queue a destroy plan and apply it in Terraform Cloud, then delete the workspace.

19. By following these steps, you can automate the deployment of a publicly accessible web server using Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Terraform Cloud.

Github Actions basics

1.    What is Github Actions?

   Platform to automate developer workflows

   CI/CD is one of the many workflows

2. Developer workflow

    Add new contributors

     Pull requests are created

     Review pull request

     Is the bug fixed?

     Merge to master branch

     Prepare release notes

     Update version number

     CI/CD pipeline: Merged code>>Test>>Build>>Development

     Automate as much as possible

3. o   Basic Github Actions

   Most common workflow: Test>>Build>>Push>>Deploy

4. o   Syntax of Wokflow

     Name

   On

     Jobs

     uses

5. o   Github Action Runner

     Runners are the machines that execute jobs in a GitHub Actions workflow. For example, a runner can clone your repository locally, install testing software, and then run commands that evaluate your code. GitHub provides runners that you can use to run your jobs, or you can host your own runners.

Conclusion: Here is a resource to learn more about DevOps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yWAtQ6wYNM&list=PLy7NrYWoggjwV7qC4kmgbgtFBsqkrsefG&index=1&t=726s