Getting started with Terraform and Kubernetes on Azure AKS

There are few prerequisites needed to be done, before proceeding for coding

• Install Azure CLI

• Install Terraform

• Terraform uses a different set of credentials to provision the infrastructure, so you should create those first.

  • az login
    • In case you’d like to work with multiple subscriptions, you can set a specific subscription - which will receive the Terraform commands - by using following Azure CLI command:
      • az account set --subscription "<your subscription id>"
  • Terraform needs a Service Principal to create resources on your behalf.

    • You will first need to get your subscription ID. (Make a note of your subscription id.)

      • az account list | grep -oP '(?<="id": ")[^"]*'

    • You can create the Service Principal with:

      • az ad sp create-for-rbac --role="Contributor" --scopes="/subscriptions/SUBSCRIPTION_ID"

    • The previous command should print a JSON payload like this:

      {
        "appId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
        "displayName": "azure-cli-2021-02-13-20-01-37",
        "name": "http://azure-cli-2021-02-13-20-01-37",
        "password": "0000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
        "tenant": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
      }
      

    • Export the following environment variables:

      export ARM_CLIENT_ID=<insert the appId from above>
      export ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=<insert your subscription id>
      export ARM_TENANT_ID=<insert the tenant from above>
      export ARM_CLIENT_SECRET=<insert the password from above>
      

• Create the Storage Account to save terraform state

  • Terraform state is used to reconcile deployed resources with Terraform configurations. State allows Terraform to know what Azure resources to add, update, or delete.By default, Terraform state is stored locally, which isn't ideal for the following reasons:
    • Local state doesn't work well in a team or collaborative environment.
    • Terraform state can include sensitive information.
    • Storing state locally increases the chance of inadvertent deletion.
    • we are not using Terraform to create the storage account. Terraform could be used, it will work the same. The remote state is stateful, meaning the data needs to persist through the lifecycle of the code. We can’t simply delete and recreate the storage account without removing the state file. Because of that, this example uses the Azure CLI.
      • Run commands from file storage.azcli

• Create directory like aks-cluster, copy terraform code in it.

  • terraform init
  • terraform plan
  • terraform apply
  • Multiple Enviornments (dev, qa, prod)
    • Workspace-separated environments use the same Terraform code but have different state files, which is useful if you want your environments to stay as similar to each other as possible, for example if you are providing development infrastructure to a team that wants to simulate running in production.
      • terraform workspace new dev
      • terraform init
      • terraform plan -var-file=dev.tfvars
      • terraform apply -var-file=dev.tfvars