Project: Set up EKS, ECR, and MySQL Database using Terraform in… by Paschal Ogu

Project: Set up EKS, ECR, and MySQL Database using Terraform in…

Paschal Ogu

Completed work

DevOps Engineer

Visual Studio Code

DevOps

Objectives:

To use infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform):

Set up Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster, Virtual private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and other required resources.

Set up a private Docker registry to store the application's Docker images.

Setup MySQL Database.

The repository referenced throughout this project is hosted on my github: https://github.com/paschalogu/Terraform

Infrastructure Architecture Diagram

Figure 1: Infrastructure diagram of the setup

Client device used to prepare the infrastructure as code. It should have git, terraform and AWS CLI installed.

GitHub: Source Code Management GitHub used for code versioning. With git pull/git push, files are kept in sync with the remote server.

Terraform: The infrastructure-as-code tool used to codify and provision the infrastructure on cloud.

AWS Cloud, where the infrastructure resources are provisioned.

Step 0: Getting Started

Prerequisites: To reproduce this set-up:

Familiarity with Linux, Git and GitHub, infrastructure-as-code and DevOps has been assumed.

Ubuntu Linux 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS distribution was used for all the activities in the task.

An AWS account with appropriate permissions to create resources like EKS, VPC, subnets, ECR, and RDS (MySQL) is required. Visit this link to create an AWS account if you don't already have an account.

Considerations:

Availability: For High availability and fault tolerance, instances have been replicated on different availability zones (us-east-1a, us-east-1b, us-east-1c) within the same region.

Security: Principle of Least Privilege was considered when assigning policy to IAM role for the cluster.

Security: Public access to the MySQL database has been disabled.

Step 1: Confirm Terraform is Installed Locally

The command to install Terraform may be slightly different, depending on your local operating system. Refer to the terraform installation documentation for system-specific requirements: Install Terraform. Below is a command to install Terraform classic on an Ubuntu Linux machine.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo snap install terraform --classic

To confirm the version of Terraform installed, run the command: terraform --version. This command will print the version of terraform installed.

Figure 2: showing version of terraform installed

Step 2: Install and Configure AWS CLI to Authenticate to AWS.

Download and install the AWS CLI based on your operating system. Refer to this AWS documentation for device/operating system specific instruction: Install or update AWS CLI.

Below is a command to install it on Linux, distribution.

curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip
sudo ./aws/install

To confirm the version of terraform installed, run the command: aws --version. This command will print the version of AWS CLI that is installed.

aws --version

Figure 3: showing version of aws-cli installed

Optionally, you can run this command to remove the installation files:

rm -r aws awscliv2.zip

Set Up AWS Environment Variables

Set up AWS environment variables to help Terraform automatically pick up your AWS credentials.

Get your access keys and secret keys from AWS: follow this documentation for the detailed steps: AWS Account and Access Keys Run the command on your terminal: aws configure.

aws configure

Set the following environment variables with your AWS credentials:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: < AWS_Access_Key_ID >

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: < AWS_Secret_Access_Key >

AWS_DEFAULT_REGION: < Preferred_AWS_region (e.g., us-east-1) >

Default output format: json

Run the following command to verify that your AWS CLI is configured correctly:

aws sts get-caller-identity

You should see information about the AWS account that your credentials are associated with.

Step 3: Create your Terraform Configuration Files:

Option 1: Pull the repository from GitHub

Clone the Terraform repository from GitHub to your client device and change directory cd into this repository:

git clone https://github.com/paschalogu/Terraform.git
cd Terraform

Option 2: Create your own terraform configuration files

Make a Repository on your local device to hold Terraform codes, and change directory to this newly created repository.

mkdir Terraform && cd Terraform

The mkdir command creates the directory, and the cd command changes the working directory to the newly created "Terraform" directory.

Create main.tf for the main Terraform configuration, variables.tf to define variables (helpful for managing settings), and outputs.tf to define outputs (display useful information after running terraform apply).

touch main.tf variables.tf outputs.tf

The command above creates the three files at ones.

Write your Terraform code in the Appropriate Files. Run the command nano main.tf and paste the code from main.tf inside: Repeat same steps for variables.tf and outputs.tf and paste the code from variables.tf and outputs.tf respectively.

This is the structure of the directory after files have been created.

Figure 4: Showing the structure of the Terraform Directory

Resources to be created:

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): The Virtual Private Cloud will be created to isolate virtual networks within the AWS cloud infrastructure, providing control over network settings, IP address ranges, and subnets securely.

Subnets: Three subnets will be created within 3 availability zones. This multi-AZ architecture is considered and designed to provide redundancy and high availability.

IAM Role: Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that has the necessary permissions for managing the cluster will be created. This IAM role will be used by the EKS cluster.

IAM Role Policy Attachment: A resource to attachment the AmazonEKSClusterPolicy to the IAM role created for the EKS cluster.

Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster: AWS EKS cluster will be created and associated with the IAM role created above.

Elastic Container Registry (ECR): An Elastic Container Registry in which you to store Application Docker images will be created.

MySQL database Instance: An RDS MySQL instance with the specified configurations like identifier, engine, instance class, allocated storage, username, password, etc.

Step 4: Initialize, Plan, and Apply Terraform Configuration in your Project Directory:

To initialize the terraform project, run the command:

terraform init

To review the list of changes that will be applied during creation, run the command below:

terraform plan

Apply Terraform configuration to create AWS resources:

terraform apply

Terraform will display the changes to be made to AWS cloud infrastructure. Type yes and press Enter to confirm and apply the changes. To see the state of the infrastructure, run the command below:

terraform state list

Figure 5: Showing the terraform state command

Alternatively, you can use AWS CLI or the AWS Management Console to verify that the resources were created as expected.

Step 5: Pushing the code to GitHub

Create a new repository on GitHub and push the Terraform repository from the command line.

Initialize the repository for git to track changes in the repository.On your project directory, run the below command to initialize git:

git init

Create a .gitignore file by running the command nano .gitignore. Input the files you don't want to commit to gitHub in this .gitignore file. This includes variable files and terraform state files. Any file added here will not be pushed to GitHub. Add below files to the .gitignore file:

.git/
.terraform/
*.tfvars
terraform.tfstate
terraform.tfstate.backup
.terraform.lock.hcl
variables.tf

Proceed to add, commit, and push the code to Github.

git add .
git commit -m "Commit Message"
git branch -M main
git remote add origin https://github.com/<github_username>/<github_repo>.git
git push -u origin main

Step 6: Deletion of Resources

To destroy, delete and clean up everything, run the destroy command below and type yes when prompted:

terraform destroy

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Completed work

Posted Feb 27, 2025

Objectives: To use infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform): Set up Elastic Kubernetes... Tagged with cloud, aws, terraform, devops.

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