Controlling Application Authentication and Access
Learn how to simplify all of your application infrastructure into just a few configuration files then deploy your code on Google Cloud Platform with this lesson. We will start by learning the core concepts behind Infrastructure as Code, discussing security best practices when working with IaC, and comparing some popular orchestration and configuration management tools.
After that, we’ll implement version control for our IaC configurations, and learn how we can automate deployment updates using Cloud Build Triggers. Next, we’ll learn how to integrate Google Secret Manager to protect any sensitive data in our source code. Then to tie it all together, we’ll walk through Google Identity and Access Management and learn how to monitor our users and resources on GCP.
After learning the basics, we’ll build our own immutable server images with Google Cloud Build using both Docker and Packer. We’ll then explore a practical usage scenario and build a WordPress deployment with Google Deployment Manager. We’ll also deploy a similar WordPress configuration using Terraform to compare the two methods.
I will be working in Visual Studio Code during the demos for this lesson, but you are also free to use any other IDE you are comfortable with instead. A demo repository is provided along with this lesson, and while we will be working with some Python and PHP in our examples, you should still be able to follow along with the demos without any background in either of these languages.
Learning Objectives
- Build server images from a configuration file using Docker and Packer.
- Learn to use Google Cloud Build with third-party build steps.
- Deploy application infrastructure from code using Google Deployment Manager and Terraform.
- Understand templating systems for Infrastructure as Code.
- Implement version control for Infrastructure as Code.
- Learn to protect secret data in IaC configurations using Google IAM role management and Google Secret Manager.
Intended Audience
This lesson is intended for programmers interested in expanding their knowledge about modern cloud-based DevOps workflows. Learning to manage Infrastructure as Code is beneficial to solo developers who need to focus as much of their time as possible on their application code and not on managing infrastructure. Development teams will also benefit from this lesson, because implementing IaC provides consistent performance across deployments in multiple environments, which greatly simplifies project collaboration. This lesson will also help prepare the viewer for the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification.
Prerequisites
- You should already have a Google Cloud Platform account.
- You should have Google Cloud SDK already installed and initialized.
- You should already have Git installed, and be familiar with its use.
- Demos will be shown in Visual Studio Code, but you're free to use any IDE they are familiar with.
- Demos will utilize some Python and PHP, but you're not required to be fluent in either of these languages to follow along with the examples.
Resources
Additional Documentation
Arthur spent seven years managing the IT infrastructure for a large entertainment complex in Arizona where he oversaw all network and server equipment and updated many on-premise systems to cloud-based solutions with Google Cloud Platform. Arthur is also a PHP and Python developer who specializes in database and API integrations. He has written several WordPress plugins, created an SDK for the Infusionsoft API, and built a custom digital signage management system powered by Raspberry Pis. Most recently, Arthur has been building Discord bots and attempting to teach a Python AI program how to compose music.