What

git repo: apmcgh/AiCore-terraform-azure-statefile
author: Alain Culos
licence: Copyleft
warranties: None, use at your own risk, may involve costs for resource usage, borne by you.

This repo aims to provide a complete working example of a terraform configuration to:

1. set-up the basic azure infrastructure, using the main account credentials, required to start any new terraform project under a pre-set SP (service principal) and RG (resource group), and SP credentials managed in a key vault.
2. set-up a sample project using SP credentials, with state file managed on azure storage, storage provided by basic set-up step, as above.

The purpose is to leave no place for manual configuration.

The goal is for this repo to be a simple community learning platform to understand the fundamental principles and tools to manage credentials (create, store, retrieve) and state file versioning on cloud storage.

To start with, this will use azure, but later versions may include equivalent constructs for GCP and AWS.

Principles:

• repeatability: automate everything, from scratch, including basic pre-requisites.
• separation of concerns: separate each logical part into its own directory.
• keep it simple: a real life scenario might be vastly more complex and require multiple repositories. As this is a proof of concept, we keep it all under one roof.
• secrets are secret: under no circumstance should secret credentials ever be stored in this repo. That is a key motivation for this experimental project.

Structure:

The basic infra set-up is kept in directory tf-infra-setup.

The project files are kept in the root directory of this repo (.).

Assumptions:

You have:

• bash (or any shell compatible with the following)
• git installed and configured
• An azure account
• Azure CLI installed
• Azure CLI authentication completed
• terraform installed

Contributions:

Contributions and suggestions are welcome. This is a platform to learn best practices in:

• terraform configuration and git management thereof
• secrets management
• terraform state file management
• full automation (leave no manual step if it can be helped at all)
• testing and validation of the above

How to use this repo:

1. clone this repo.
2. login to your azure account with the CLI.
3. check tf-infra-setup/variables.tf, and modify according to your requirements.
4. set-up the basic infra:

   cd tf-infra-setup
   terraform init
   terraform validate
   terraform plan       # check that all is green
   terraform apply      # untested
   cd ..
   

5. set-up the project:

   # TBD
   echo TBD
   

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TODO

See Issues

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Command history

Azure set-up

Create files:

.
├── main.tf             # work not started
├── README.md           # this file
├── .gitignore          # ignore state files and terraform generated files
└── tf-infra-setup
    ├── main.tf         # first version, untested
    └── variables.tf    # first version, untested

Validate infra files:

cd tf-infra-setup
terraform init
terraform validate
terraform plan      # all is green
cd ..

Create initial repo:

git init # branch master
git add .
git commit -m 'Create project AiCore learning - terraform state file on azure - set-up and use'
gh auth status
gh repo create --source . --push --public

Create develop branch:

git branch develop
git checkout develop
git add .
git commit -m 'Improve README'
git push --set-upstream origin develop

Merge into master:

git checkout master
git merge develop
git push
git checkout develop # go back to develop

Register first features to develop:

gh issue create -t "Feature: Use stored credentials" -b "Find out how to use the credentials stored in the key vault to create and manage a sample terraform project in the given RG, with the given SP."
gh issue create -t "Feature: State file in cloud" -b "Configure terraform sample project to manage state file in azure storage."
gh issue create -t "Feature: State file versioning in cloud" -b "Configure terraform sample project to manage state file versioning in azure storage."