Using Ansible's GCP Module to Provision a Kubernetes Cluster in Google Cloud

Tutorial

For a full tutorial on using Ansible to provision a Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud, check out Dzero Labs' blog post on Medium.

Be sure to also check out our post on Shifting from Infrastructure as Code to Infrastructure as Data.

Quickstart

If you'd like to skip the tutorial altogether, you can use the quickstart guide below.

For your convenience, I've created a Dockerfile with Ansible and the gcloud CLI installed.

Pre-requisites

• A Google Cloud project
• A Google Cloud service account
• Docker installed on your local machine

1- Set up project values

You must replace the following values in setup.sh:

• <gcp_project_name>: Your own GCP project name
• <service_account_name>: Name of your GCP service account
• <service_account_private_key_json>: Fully-qualified name of your Google Service Account's private key JSON file (e.g. /home/myuser/my-sa.json or ./my-sa.json)

Next, run the following script:

./setup.sh

This will replace the values you set above with your own GCP project's values in playbook.yml and startup.sh.

2- Build the Dockerfile

docker build -t docker-ansible:1.0.0 docker

2- Start the container instance

Run the container instance. Here, we're mapping the ansible folder on our host machine to the /workdir/ansible folder in the container instance.

docker run -it --rm \
    -v $(pwd)/ansible:/workdir/ansible \
    -v $(pwd)/manifest:/workdir/manifest \
    docker-ansible:1.0.0 /bin/bash

3- Run the playbook

This playbook will create a GKE cluster and node pool, and update the container instance's kubeconfig so that you can connect to the cluster.

From within the container instance run the following command:

./startup.sh && ansible-playbook -vv --extra-vars cluster_state=present ansible/playbook.yml

To delete the cluster and node pool, run the following command from within the container instance:

./startup.sh && ansible-playbook -vv --extra-vars cluster_state=absent ansible/playbook.yml

4- Deploy the sample app

This will create a:

• Namespace
• Deployment
• Service

kubectl apply -f manifest/deployment.yml

Get the LoadBalancer IP:

LOAD_BALANCER_IP=$(kubectl get -n foo service service -o "go-template={{range .status.loadBalancer.ingress}}{{or .ip .hostname}}{{end}}")

Go to your browser and enter the following IP:

http://$LOAD_BALANCER_IP

References

• How to Create a gCloud service account
• Ansible Ref: Create GKE Cluster Module
• Ansible Ref: Create GKE Node Pool Module