Use Terraform to create a VPC and a Kubernetes Cluster on IBM Cloud

This blog post contains a simple example to create a Virtual Private Cloud and a Kubernetes Cluster on IBM Cloud using Terraform. The example is based on following resources:

• IBM Cloud VPC Gen 2 cluster example
• Terraform Registry
• Networking for the VPC and Kubernetes Clusters

You can find a GitHub project with all the source code for Terraform and a bash automation here.

The blog post is structured in following sections:

• Simplified architecture overview
• Terraform variables overview
• Prerequisites (for an automated bash setup)
• Step by step example setup
• Summary

Simplified architecture of overview

Here you can get an overview of the simplified architecture and the resources which will be created/configured on IBM Cloud:

• 1 x Virtual Private Cloud
  • 3 x Security Groups
    • 1 x Default
    • 2 x Related to the Kubernetes Cluster (created by the Kubernetes Service creation)
  • 1 x Access control list
  • 1 x Routing table
  • 1 x Virtual Private Endpoint Gateway (created by the Kubernetes Service creation)
  • 1 x Public load balancer (created by the Kubernetes Service creation)
• 1 x Kubernetes Cluster
  • Including 3 fully IBM managed master nodes
  • Configured 2 worker nodes (see IBM Cloud responsibilities)
  • Enabled Block Storage for VPC
  • Enabled service endpoint for public and private communication

Terraform variables overview

Note: IBM Cloud on the Terraform registry.

Prerequisites for a local setup

To use an example bash automation following tools need to be installed on the local computer

• IBM Cloud CLI
  • Plugin VPC infrastructure
  • Plugin Container-service
• Terraform

Example setup

Here are the steps to use Terraform locally with a bash automation, but you can also use Schematics on IBM Cloud for the setup. Here is an older blog post I wrote which does cover an example how to use Schematics for creating a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Just follow this link.

Step 1: Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/thomassuedbroecker/terraform-vpc-kubernetes.git
cd terraform-vpc-kubernetes

Step 2: Verify the configuration of the variables.tf file

nano variables.tf

Step 3: Create a variables.env file

cat variables_template.env > variables.env

Step 4: Add an IBM Cloud access key to your local variables.env file

nano variables.env

Content of the file:

export IC_API_KEY=YOUR_IBM_CLOUD_ACCESS_KEY
export TF_LOG=debug
export REGION="us-south"
export GROUP="default"

Step 5: Execute the bash automation

Execute the create_vpc_kubernetes_cluster_with_terraform.sh bash script. The creation can take up to 2 hours, depending on the which region you are using and where you are located.

sh create_vpc_kubernetes_cluster_with_terraform.sh

Summary

I like using Terraform for infrastructure as code locally on my machine or using it with Schematics on IBM Cloud. With Schematics you have an easy overview of your created resources and you can directly navigate to you resources, update your resources or delete your resources. In the following image you see the resources created by the Terraform example when I was using Schematics:

There is a lot of useful documentation out there, so that you can achieve very fast an implementation with Terraform. In my case I used as a starting point these three very useful links:

• IBM Cloud VPC Gen 2 cluster example
• Terraform Registry
• Networking for the VPC and Kubernetes Clusters

I hope this was useful to you and let’s see what’s next?

Greetings,

Thomas

#ibmcloud, #vpc, #schematics, #terraform, #kubernetes